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WebShareIt installation and management guide

This guide is intended for system administrators who are installing / customising or managing a site running WebShareIt. WebShareIt is a cgi and because it's output comes from html based template files it can be extensively customized to provide a distinctive web based file sharing service for your customers. WebShareIt comes with a default set of template files this allows it to be used as is, or to be completely rewritten to provide a particular look and feel to make it unique.

The following sections describe...

• General use.
• Configuration settings.
• Cgi commands
• Templates.
• New user defaults
• User administration
• Updates and version information.
• Downloads.
• Main page.

Configuration settings

In order to configure the WebShareIt you need to edit the configuration file webshareit.ini found in the cgi's directory of your web server, the settings you can use in the webshareit.ini file are as follows...

Cgi commands

WebShareIt is a cgi and cgi programs gather input from web pages, as a result to tell the cgi what you want it to do you need to send it a command. To ask it to do something you use the "cmd" variable. For example in a query "?cmd=login" or as a form input tag <input type="text" name="cmd" value="login"> or if you want you can use an <input type="image" tag but you need to use the image name to specify the command e.g. <input type="image" name="login".

All these method will tell the cgi to attempt to login. Of course more information is required to do a login command, as in all the commands, below is a table explaining the commands and what variables are required. Most commands require you to be logged in, if so they require the utoken variable produced by the login and auto_login commands.

* optional variable.
^ command available before login.

Templates

WebShareIt uses template files to determine the output seen by the user. These files are simple html text files with extra bits. The extra bits are either variables or commands. Variables and commands are replaced or executed at runtime so while you only have one copy of the template file WebShareIt may create hundreds of different pages form it.

In order to place the value of a variable in a page returned by WebShareIt, simply place a || followed by the variable name and then another ||, like so...
||name||

and upon execution the ||name|| will be replaced by it's value and displayed.

There are several commands available and they all perform different operations. Using a command is similar to inserting a variable's value. You precede the command name with a || and finish it with a || as well, like so...
||define||

some commands like the define command require parameters. In order to add parameters to commands, simply seperate each parameter with a || like so....
||define||setting||value||

This command would create a variable called "setting" and give it a value "value".

Some commands are used to perform logical operations, like ||ifdef|| or ||ifequal||. In cases like these, the operation is performed and, depending on the outcome, the html following the command is either displayed or skipped. In order to reverse a logical operation, use the ||else|| command. In order to end a logical operation, use the ||endif|| command.

IMPORTANT: There must be an equal number of logical commands and concluding endif commands or errors will occur during template display.

Here is an example of a couple of logical operation commands...

||ifequal||name||netwin||
  <p>Name is netwin</p>
  ||ifdef||pass||
    <p>Password supplied</p>
  ||else||
    <p>No pass</p>
  ||endif||
||else||
  <p>Name is ||name||</p>
||endif||

Notice above that there are two logical operation commands -  ifequal (if equal) and ifdef (if defined) - and thus there are two endif commands. Also note that the lines have been tabbed to show which statements enclose others. This makes no difference to the cgi but makes it easier to read.

The cgi interprets the above as follows...
Does name = "netwin",
    If it does, the cgi writes "<p>Name is netwin</p>"
Does the variable pass exist,
    If it does, the cgi writes "<p>Password supplied</p>"
    If it doesn't, the cgi reads but doesn't write lines until the ||else|| statement on line five.
        The cgi writes "<p>No pass</p>"
    If it doesn't, the cgi reads but doesn't write any lines until the third to last line, an ||else|| command.
        The cgi writes "<p>Name is ||name||</p>"

Complete list of logical commands
The text variable, variableA, and variableB have been used where you could type either a variable name or some text to be matched literally.

The commands above may seem rather limited, say for example you wanted to test whether something wasn't equal to something, there is no actual command for that but you can use the ifequal command and an else statement to achive the desired result, for example.
||ifequal||foo||bar||
||else||
...etc...
||endif||

The same is true for ifdef, iflower, and ifinstr.

Other commands

More complicated commands

Below is a list of more complicated commands. These commands come in two types, the commands which act like the commands above....

i.e.   ||command_name||vars||vars...etc...

and a new type of command which "loops" around, giving new information each time. These commands are identified by the "begin_" prefix to the command name. A good example is the begin_files command, this command can be implemented like this...
||begin_files||
...html containing a ||file_name|| somewhere...
||end_files||
What the template above will show is the html between the begin_files and the end_files label repeated for as many files as there are. So if there are five files then it will be repeated five times. This is good for a select list such as...
<select name=files>
||begin_files||
<option name="||files_name||">||files_name||</option>
||end_files||
</select>

New user defaults

When a user logs in for the first time WebShareIt asks that user for thier personal information, it also loads some default settings from a file called newuser.dat found in the WebShareIt workarea directory. This file is a plain text file in the same format as the ini file, so # means comment and the lines contain "setting_name<whitespace>value<end_line>". The settings you can place in this file are as follows:

In addition to the newuser.dat file there are two more files that you can place in the workarea directory to give new users default settings, they are "site.idx" and "visit.idx". These files are plain text files containing site and visit entries, these entries are one per line and each file is seperated by a | symbol.

The visit.idx file entry format is:
  username|path|password
for example:
  john|/Public|secret

The site.idx entry format is:
  site|port|username|password|path
for example:
  ftp.netwinsite.com|21|Anonymous|email@netwinsite.com|/pub/webshareit

The easiest way to create these files is to set the entries up with the cgi for a user then copy them out of the users folder to the workarea, but you can edit them by hand if you prefer.

User administration

In order to administrate your users you first need a designated manager account, to designate an account as the manager you simply edit the webshareit.ini file and add / modify the manager setting so it specifies the manager account, i.e.
  manager thisaccount
you can add several manager accounts by simply adding more manager settings i.e.
  manager thisaccount
  manager thataccount
and so on.

Next you login with the account designated as the manager, and you should see the exact same page as normal except now there is a users button in the menu that was not there before. Click this button. You will see a list of all the users who have logged into WebShareIt, clicking any of these username will display info on the user account like last login, upload, and download and will also let you set quota's and add ftp servers, visits and mounted folders to the user. Back on the user list page you will see the same options for quota's, ftp servers, visits and mounted folders but here you can specify a wild card and it will add what you specify to all users matching that wild card.