Professional Edition

The Professional Edition is a major upgrade from the Standard Edition, and for most people, it is money well spent. Not only does it include dozens of additional features, but it also is much easier to install and configure. It even looks much nicer. Just like the Standard Edition, the Professional Edition can run on both Unix and Windows NT, uses our sophisticated Secure Logon system that allows users to logon once and have the program "remember" them from screen to screen so that they don't have to login again, and includes our database-driven classifieds features such as range searching. It also adds a sophisticated short results ad table format that allows your users to instantly resort their search results on the fly, and it includes a nice navigation bar that allows your users to easily jump to other groups of results (instead of always having to click on the "Next" button). This bar even helps your users by "remembering" which groups they have already seen.

Feature Summary

The following features are included with our $349 Professional Edition (items printed in red are new features in the Professional Edition that are not available in the Standard Edition):

• Five separate classified ads database sections for Automobiles, Employment, General Merchandise, Housing, and Personal ads, each with separate variables and forms optimized for these categories
• Administrator can set number of days before ads expire
• Optional notification by e-mail to users whose ads are about to expire
• Optional purging of ads that are older than an administrator-specified number of days
• Powerful database searching capabilities that allow users to search for ads by many different fields and even by discrete ranges within fields, such as price ranges or date ranges
• Portability to both Unix and Windows NT web servers
• Scalable to tens of thousands of ads (each of the five sections can hold anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 ads, depending on the processor speed, memory, and other aspects of your web server)
• Optional notification by e-mail to the administrator when users post, modify, or delete ads, when they register, and when old ads are purged
• Encryption based authentication for the administrator
• Allows users to modify or delete their own ads at any time
• Alphabetical, numeric, or date sorting on any field, as well as reverse sorting, case sensitive, and exact match options.
• Checks to verify e-mail addresses and URLs
• Checks to make sure that users entered contact information
• Various security checks
• Ability to strip out "bad words" from the ads that users post.
• Allows the administrator to easily modify or delete any ad at any time from the web interface (you can also delete multiple ads at a time).
• Option to automatically send e-mail replies to users who post ads
• Can display URLs and e-mail addresses as clickable links
• Can display photos, sound files, and even video clips in ads
• Can include links to maps in Housing ads
• Size of included text in ads can be controlled by the admin
• Users can decide how many ads are displayed on each search results page through a menu choice on the search form (admin can set the default number)
• Users can decide how search results should be sorted through a menu choice on the search form (admin can also set default)
• Admin can change the general HTML layout for the various pages displayed by the program
• Ability to display advertising banners within the program. These can be configured through program variables.
• Includes demo HTML files for Front, Help, Guidelines, Add-ons, Search Tips, and Maps information pages, as well as various graphics
• Users who have forgotten their user name can search for it using their e-mail address
• Logs all user actions, including posting, modifying, or deleting ads
• Can display total number of ads in each section on the front page for that section
• Systemwide default variables contained in one configuration file
• Allows users who forgot their passwords to search for them based on their username and have the password e-mailed to them
• Can optionally send an automatic e-mail reply to users who register for an account. The message welcomes them and gives them their username and password. This might also encourage users who register but don't immediately post an ad to come back later and post their ad.
• Includes "Go Back" buttons on certain pages, such as error message pages.
• Includes better handling of e-mail messages to users
• Includes easier and better support for Windows NT
• Includes IP address logging in log files and in e-mail notices sent to the admin.
• Includes optional "killfile" where admin can list IP addresses and/or usernames of spammers or other offensive users that the admin wants to prevent from posting new ads.
• Includes file-locking variable that can be set to use either the system's flock command (for Unix systems) or the program's own built-in file locking mechanism
• Includes global variables for listings of cities and states
• Contains a powerful sorting routine that is sophisticated enough to properly recognize various inputs that users may use (for example, it understands that $40k means $40,000)
• Contains a much nicer display than the Standard Edition
• Automatically inserts the current ad's information in the modification form.
• Optionally can be set up to allow users to select more than one item for certain items during searches (such as city, etc.) using new OR logic
• Allows admin to specify required fields in the setup files.
• Contains Quick Search options for searching by keyword, by ads posted within the last x days, or by all ads. Also contains user-friendly boolean logic search options on the keyword search form.
• Contains short results format for ads with links to details (long format). The short results format tables allow users to re-sort their search results on the fly by clicking on the table headers.
• Sophisticated navigation bar includes navigation arrows and buttons below search results to help users quickly jump to different sections of their search results without having to keep hitting the "Next" button.
• Includes dates in registration information and an update routine to the main program that updates the registration date when the person posts, modifies, or deletes an ad. That way, the admin can prune old registration entries of people who haven't been back in a long time if necessary (in order to keep the registration file from getting too large).
• Almost all of the HTML output, error output, and mail output is contained in a separate file, which makes it much easier to translate this program into different languages. It also makes it easier for the admin to configure these.
• All user-configurable variables are contained in one file and are preceded by text that explains what each variable does and how it should be set.
• Contains a universal NT mail subroutine. That way, only one subroutine needs to be modified to support Blat or other NT mail programs (support for Blat is built in by default).

Quite simply, our high-end classified ads programs are the best CGI-based classified ads programs that you can buy. Our programs contain features available nowhere else, and we are continuously improving our products in order to remain the premium vendor of web-based classifieds solutions. We have seen some vastly inferior classified ads programs out there that claim to be "smart" or to be the "most configurable classified ads", but in fact, they're neither. Don't be ripped off by these other programs. Here are some of the features of our high-end programs that are missing in other programs:

• Powerful database searching capabilities. With other inferior programs, your users will not be able to conduct searches based upon the city, or based upon a price range, number of bedrooms and bathrooms (for housing ads), age range (for personal ads), specific features (such as automatic or manual transmission for auto ads, or fireplace, etc. for housing ads), date range, and many, many more. Nor will their "keyword advisory service" be able to send users new ads based on these specific search criteria. This is a serious deficiency that will severely hamper your ads down the road as your database grows larger.
• Portable to virtually any server. Most of the other programs will not even work on Windows NT. Our program has been specifically designed to work on both Unix and Windows NT. Even if you're using Unix, our program will give you more flexibility in that you will be able to easily port it to an NT server if you ever decide to move your web site for some reason.
• Scalable to tens of thousands of ads. Other programs are not nearly as scalable as ours. In fact, if you look at their literature, some programs advise you to turn off the "Show all ads" feature once the number of ads get to be over 350 ads. Because of the weak architectural design of these programs, you will probably be able to maintain only a few hundred ads maximum. To have a reasonably useful classified ads section that will cause your users to come back repeatedly, you will need to have many more ads than that. You certainly don't want to lock yourself into a program that will not be able to expand as your site grows. Our program, on the other hand, is scalable to tens of thousands of ads (we have successfully tested it with as many as 10,000 ads in each section, running on a Pentium Pro 200 server). Moreover, our program gives your users the option of displaying as few as 10 ads per page, or as many as 250. In fact, you can easily change these settings to whatever you want. The other guys don't even offer this capability. Their programs will always show however many ads are in your entire database or match your user's inquiry, so when you start to get more than 50 or so ads, these programs will overload the memory of some of your users' web browsers, causing them to crash. This is not a good way to build good will among your users, and it will kill the usefulness of your classified ads after a very short time period.
• Secure through the use of encryption-based authentication for the administrator. The other programs have very serious security deficiencies. We have actually seen one program where your password (the admin's password) is simply stored as plain text within a configuration file. As you may already be aware, this is very dangerous, because other people can potentially see this file and get access to your administrative password. Then they can alter your program, and possibly other files on your server. Under our program, the administrative password is stored as an encrypted password in a separate file, so that that file or directory can also be password-protected for double protection. Even if someone was able to find it, all they would see is a bunch of computer gibberish, so they wouldn't be able to do any damage.
• Configurable through a myriad of options. We have seen other programs that claim to be the "most configurable classified ads", but none offer more configuration options than ours. The other guys let you change font text or colors, but ours lets you change the general HTML layout for the entire page through a pagesetup and pageclose variable (These two variables do not modify the "guts" of the program such as the forms created on the fly. Some of these can be changed relatively easily, but others can be tricky. We may be able to assist you with modest customizations). Ours even lets you easily add banners to your pages. No other classified ads program available offers you this option.

Moreover, the e-Classifieds Professional Edition is part of a family of classified ads programs that includes our high-end, database-driven Commerce Edition, which offers unrivaled performance and features. As a result, it benefits from our expertise as the market leader in producing premium-quality web-based classifieds solutions. In addition, all of these programs share a similar interface, and registered owners of the Professional Edition are eligible for discounted upgrades to the higher versions. That way, you won't have to face the dilemma of either being forever locked into a low-end solution or having to pay full purchase price again later on to obtain a higher-end program, as you would if you were to purchase from one of our competitors, who do not even offer any high-end versions. No matter what your budget may be, we have a classifieds program designed for you.

Last modified: Monday, 09-Nov-1998 00:00:00 EST
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