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Appearance
In order to change the appearance options for your links directory, you will need to login to your administrator account. You may login by clicking "Login/Create Account" on the top menu bar of the directory. After you are logged in, you will be presented with the user account screen. On the left hand menu, you should see a link labeled "System Admin". Clicking this link will take you to the admin control panel.
When you enter the admin control panel, you will see a list of links in the left hand column. This section of the manual deals with the "Manage Appearance" section of your control panel. After clicking the "Manage Appearance" link, you will be presented with the settings which controls the appearance of your links directory.
The page header and page footer sections will allow you to place HTML content into your links directory. For instance if you wanted to place a menu system at the top of your links directory, you would place that HTML into the box presented. Through the use of these two boxes, you are able to wrap content all the way around the links directory, making it appear seemless with your existing web site. For more information on how to wrap content around the directory, please click here. You may also opt to instruct the links directory to load an external HTML or PHP file to use as the header/footer. This is done by entering "file:/physical/path/on/server/to/the/filetorun.php" into the header box. You must enter the physical path, and not the url to the file in order for this to work.
The page width setting will allow you to choose how wide to make the links directory. You may enter a fixed pixel width such as "750", or you may enter a percentage such as "90%". The links directory will always center itself in the amount of space which you give it.
In this section you will also find settings so that you may choose how many columns you wish categories and links to be displayed in. You will also be able to choose how many links you wish to show per page. If there are more links for the category being viewed than you allowed to be displayed per page, a navigation/page selector will appear at the bottom of the page to allow the visitor to change pages.
The setting labeled "Display subcats under categories" will allow you to display up to 3 randomly chosen subcategories to be displayed as links under the category itself.
You have the ability to change which links are displayed on the top and bottom menus by selecting which options you wish in the "Menu items to display" section. This will allow you to turn off items such as "Most Popular" if you do not wish to display the most popular links.
You have the same type of control over which information is displayed for a link. If you do not wish to display something such as the date the link was added, or how many reviews a link has, simply uncheck the box next to the display item and it will not appear on your links directory.
The side panels section allows you to choose which of the informational panels to display in your directory, and in which order to display them. Simply choose which of the four panels you want to display, and which slot you wish to display them and they will appear on the directory.
You may upload a graphical/flash banner to your directory, or delete your current banner from the system by using the controls under "Banner". This will allow you to place your own logo onto the directory, to make it better fit with the rest of your web site. The banners are not resized by the system, so they will appear exactly as you created the banner. The banner will automatically link to the home page of your directory, should someone click on it.
The last section of this portion of your admin panel, deals with the colorization/fonts for your directory. BosDirectory utilizes CSS to setup all of the colors, and text generated by the directory. If you are not familiar with CSS, you may read more about it at the official home for CSS, http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/. You may make changes to your CSS definitations in the box provided, or copy/paste your definitations into an external CSS editor to make changes there. You are more than free to ADD additional CSS definitations to this box, but do not REMOVE any of the definitations.
For specifics on individual items on this screen, please see the reference section.
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