Gossamer Links Walkthrough Step 3

Database Menu:

Make sure you are now looking at the Database screen

Navigation Bar:

On your left, you'll see a navigation bar made up of three form elements. You can easily manage the four main tables in Gossamer Links: Users, Links, Categories and Reviews. To add, modify, delete or search simply:

1. Select what table you want to work on: Users, Links, Category or Reviews
2. Select what you want to do: Add, Modify, Delete, Search, List All or Properties
3. If you are modifying, deleting or searching you can enter in the id number of username of the record you want here and it will come up immediately rather then having to search for it.
4. Hit go (or press Enter)!

Try selecting Links and List All and hit go. This will display a list of all the links in the database that you can page through.

Changing the Table Structure:

Gossamer Links makes it easy to alter the tables in your directory. You can add, rename and delete columns for each table. This has been improved. Select the table you want, and then choose properties.

You should now see a list of all the columns in that table. There are links at the bottom that will let you add or remove columns that you should try clicking on. Also, are links to import/export data which will come in very handy. The last option, Resync Data, will search for new or missing columns, and update the Links table to match any imported data.

Also on the database menu are several tools that help you manage your links. The first three, Validate Links, Validate Changes and Validate Reviews, let you approve user-submitted new links and changes to links, as well as reviews of links in your directory.

Link Checking:

By clicking on Verify Links you can have the program check each link in the directory to see if it is still responding. FTP and even HTTPS (SSL) links can be accessed. The link checker runs in parallel and can check up to 300 links a minute! It also remembers previous checks, so you can use the Link Status menu to check only links that haven't been checked in the last n days, or only bad links, etc.

Import/Export:

You can easily import links from any previous version of Gossamer Links, and also quickly restore your directory from backup files in case of emergencies!

MySQLMan:

Included in every copy of Gossamer Links is a pre-installed, pre-configured copy of MySQLMan, our powerful database management tool. For more information on this helpful tool to manage your MySQL database, please visit http://www.gossamer-threads.com/scripts/mysqlman/.

The last options are used to rebuild indexes in case you change the database manually. These can be run from shell for very large databases.

We'll now move on to the Build menu.

Continue with the Demo - Step 4 »