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  CORANTO V 1.2.1
Released: 21 July 2003
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What is Coranto?
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Coranto is one of the most powerful Content Management System (CMS) available on the market. It is a freeware product written in Perl and it can help the development and streamlining of your site(s). It is written to be a multiuser environment for posting news articles on a web site and supports advanced features as:

- Multilevel users (Super-administrators, Administrators, Standard, Guest)
- Multiple Categories with user permissin settings
- Multiple News Styles
- Multiple Profiles (collecting together news from single or multiple categories)
- Custom User fields in the submission system
- Template driven system
- Integrated Backup System
- Skinnable Interface
- Automatic Archiving System
- Web-driven totally visual system
- Extending functionality via powerful Addons
- Powerful text database data storage
- Generation of static files (via the Maginot Addon)
- Editing and posting past and future news (via the ChangeDateNew Addon)

It has been developed by a single man, known as Elvii, as evolution of a long and hard-worked set of scripts (NewsPro) which are still in use in thousands of sites. When Elvii disappeared in 2001, the Coranto (or NewPro 4) script was in its beta 29 form. 
Since then it has been improved by a community of users and passionates, mainly bug-fixed and brought to its current very stable and prime-time state, suitable for any web site.

At the same time, tens of Addons have added extra functionality to Coranto. Among those some of the most popular:
- Newsletter Addons
- More powerful backup and transfer system
- Search addon
- Related News automatic finder
- News Ticker Addon
- Upload images and thumbnailing system addon
- Statistics addon
- MySQL-database Coranto version
- News Comments systems (both board-based and news-based)
- Alphabet list page creation addon
- Quotes addon
- Smilies addon
- Guestpost addon allowing posting also to non-registered users
- XML/RSS 0.91 headings automatic creatin addon
- Wap site automatic creation addon
- WYSIWYG editing addon
- Language localisation support
- Faster build addons

Nowadays, Coranto is a powerful, fast and complete tool for any webmaster. 
It is entirely free and it supports any server (Unix, Linux, Windows) that has Perl 5.005 (or higher) installed on it. 
With it, many thousands of sites (from small to very large) are managed everyday worldwide.


Versions
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You can see the full history in /documentation/changelog.txt. But in short we have:

* Coranto build 29 (October 2001): is the last 'official' version that the original author, Elvii, has left to the community.
* Coranto 1.02 (November 2002): was a version containing some bugs fixes and adding privacy functions by LordPhi. Still heavily based on the original code
* Coranto 1.11 (June 2003): Is an improved/bug-fix version based on the 1.02 code and further enhancements/functions integrated in the core. Mainly driven by Lawrence
* Coranto 1.2.x (July 2003): Is a version that seeks further performance optimisation over the stable core 1.11. Started by cerberos76

The place to discuss Coranto and report bugs is the Coranto Forum, at:
http://coranto.gweilo.org/forum/


INSTALLATION AND REQUIREMENTS
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Setup instructions are in /documentation/setup.html, which you will find in the same file as this readme.txt. Open setup.html in your web browser to read about the setup and follow the steps provided. If you are an advanced user (and are aware of necessary chmod settings), to initialise the setup process you should upload the files on the cgi-bin folder on your web server and call the file coranto.cgi (or coranto.pl if on a windows server) to start the automatic process.

Coranto will work both on Unix, Linux and Windows servers. 
To set it up you simply need some space on your web server (~300 KB for Coranto files + some space for your news), the ability to run your cgi/perl 5 scripts and to write to some folders on your web space. There is no need for anything else (no need for SQL/Access databases), no shell or telnet access necessary, no administrator privileges. Coranto (default version) keeps all the news in a single flat database file, called newsdat.txt and does all the news processing in automatic.

A typical medium-large site will produce about 3-5 MB of news (text) a year (this is just text). So, plan ahead for the necessary web space and building resources. Performance with Coranto builds will be very good up to 5-10 MB (dependent on profile/style complexity you might go ahead even further with no problems). 
After that you are probably better disabling the automatic build and using Partial Build/Extractor addons and other efficient mechanisms that avoid excessive strain on your hosting server.
Larger sites might wish to consider the MySQL version of Coranto for greater scalability.
If you use static pages, the performance of the pages viewed by the public has NO relevance whatsoever with the size of your Coranto database, but depends on how good is your provider, what band/server power can offer to each site, how many requests you get at the same time etc...


USE
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Coranto has a very appealing and easy-to-use interface. Once it is installed on your system, you (or your posters) simply login and follow very simple menus to submit news/create styles, templates and build your site!

In a typical configuration, the webmaster of a site will create multiple multiple categories of news (e.g.: news, reviews, previews, interviews, screens etc), associating one or more categories ( eg. news, reviews) to a profile (e.g. front_page). 
Then he/she will create a news style to associate to each profile (the news style is just a set of html instructions in which you insert some special Coranto tags that gets substituted with the actual text-database part of news at build time - see /documentation/tagsdoc.html for full explanations of what sort of tags are possible).
Finally he/she will create a template for each profile (the template is the fixed part that stays the same for all news, e.g. your page headers and footers with your ads/copyright notes...).
At submission time, the poster will choose a category, and post his news item. Coranto will then automatically (or manually if you set it so) refresh the content of all the profiles containing that category wihtout you or the poster having to worry about that. The site will be updating totally in automatic!
Of course you can then have also multiple profiles for multiple parts of your site, use headlines (automatically created with Standard profiles), link to static pages to save server resources etc...
Coranto power is in its flexibility to do whatever you want. And with so many addons ready to use, you will just need to have clear ideas of what content you want to put on your site. Coranto will do the rest!

And don't forget: you can also easily create your own addons (see /documentation/addonguide.html) using simple perl and then hook them into the coranto core with very simple prewritten wrappers. So the possibilities are limitless!!


SSI CODES
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If you want to use SSI in your templates, you can have Coranto automatically process them using "special" tags....

<include file="filename.txt">
<exec cgi="script.cgi">

During Build News, these tags will be replaced by the output of the text file/perl script :)


LICENSE
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This program is freeware to use both on personal and commercial sites. 

This was the clear statement mission always expressed by the original author Elvii. Elvii was also asking a link back to its Coranto site from each full-news page (not required from the headlines pages) as a gratitude and advertising gesture for his great program. 
The Elvii original site was: http://www.amphibianweb.com. That site has since its departure got into the hands of cybersquatters (a search engine not related at all with Coranto). 
For this reason, from v 1.2.0, the links will be by default disabled. 
If anyone wishes gratitude to the team that continue the development of Coranto they can enable the links to the Unofficial Coranto web site from inside any Standard Profile settings. 
The links will then be automatically added to your news and will point either to the current Coranto support forum: http://coranto.gweilo.org/forum/ or to the Unofficial Coranto web pages http://coranto.gweilo.org/, as per your preferences.
