A BULLETIN/DOORS/FILES MENU GENERATOR FOR PCBOARD Version 1.5 - By Charlie Crawford. DOCUMENTATION Lazy PCBOARD sysops of the world - unite! Here's a program I wrote to save me all those hours of tedious menu writing for bulletins, doors, and file areas. Now you can run it too! It's free and all you gotta do if you don't like it is to delete the files. Not bad huh? BGPCB essentially gives you the options of generating menus with either multi colored banners, selection numbers, and names, or uniform listings in uniform color schemes. It asks you a bunch of questions and generates either the BLT, Dir, or Doors menu file depending upon your selection. In generating those files, it will copy your existing files to their original name with the file extension .org for original and replace the BLT, DIR, or DOORs file with the new one. This latter feature allows you to delete the new file and rename the .org file to the appropriate name and restore your old menu if you like. to get the thing up and running, all you gotta do is to unzip the file BGPCBVX.zip" ( WHERE X is the version number) to a subdirectory of your choice and go there and type "BGPCB" to start. I suggest that you back up your menus and then unzip the program and related files to your PCB\GEN subdirectory if you want to always be able to use the program with immediate results. When running the program you get a initial text screen that basically tells you what the program does. This serves both as a reminder and something for lazy folks like me who hate to read the docs before crashing right into whatever the program is... Now comes the fun! You get to choose whether you want a banner or not. Some folks like their menus to start off with a heading like "MCB BBS BULLETIN LISTINGS" and so a banner is useful and it will repeat every 5 listings or so. This gives you a chance to get creative and put something in the menu that you think will enchant your callers. You can choose not to use a banner if you like since some folks get annoyed by having to read through a bunch of menu listings and get all those unnecessary banners. The only thing I can tell you is that if you like to offset the color schemes with banners, then you got the ability to do it in the program. Next, you can select to Quit without doing anything (in case you get cold feet) or Exit and generate the file from the existing data in the database, or do a global set of color changes or go into the database to add or edit existing records. If you choose X to exit, then the program takes the database associated with your bulletins, files, or doors selection and generates a proper menu file using the data it has. If you choose G to globally change colors then you will be asked what color you want the banners to be (if you selected to use banners), what colors the numbers of the listings should be and what color the listing should be. This gives you a uniform color scheme in your menus. The option also gives you a chance to leave existing colors for either the banners, the selection numbers, or the listing names. This allows for a mix of uniform colors and variety as well. So you could have all blue banners, yellow selection listings and green listing names or you could have the same with different colored names or whatever. Of course, using the global option before entering andy data would not be a good use of time since there would be nothing to globally change. If you choose C to continue rather than G for global, then you get to the actual database entries you will need to make to generate the listings. This option presents you with an opportunity to either start at the first entry, a particular listing or go to a fresh record to add a new listing. the important thing here is that you always keep your database records consistent with the listing numbers. That means that record number one in the database should correspond to listing number 1 in the menu and so forth. This is not hard to do since it is the natural order of things. The only time you would get in trouble is if you were to change a door or something and then instead of editing record number 2 for door number 2, you created a new record after record 35 or whatever and listed the selection number as 2. What would happen there is the file generator would see record number 2 and listing number 2 and list it as the second menu listing and then later get to record 36 and see listing number 2 and list it again with the different door name. That would not make any difference to the computer since it is too stupid to appreciate your innate intelligence, but your callers would be ticked pretty fast huh. same thing holds true if you fail to enter info in a record and move on to the next record and enter the information there... SO BE SURE THAT YOUR ENTRIES CORRESPOND IN SEQUENCE TO THE DATABASE LISTINGS PRESENTED! Going down through the listings is pretty self explanatory since you simply answer the prompts and when you reach the end of the listings, then you get an opportunity to either enter a new listing or generate the menu. That's about it for the docs but here are some questions and answers that might help you more. Q: When the program generates a menu file, I see that it says something about "file not found" and "no file copied" and I get real nervous and start smoking again. What is wrong. A: If you run the program with no existing DIr, BLT, or DOORS menu file then the program can't have DOS copy your existing files to the ".org" extension in case you want to use the older ones again. So the error message is correct, but not important to the performance of the program... Q: Why don't you use pretty icons and such? A: I wrote the program to be speech friendly for sysops who use synthetic speech output to read their screens. Graphics and icons stink when it comes to that and so you get performance from tthe program, but not something that will win an art contest. Q: How do I get in touch with you to register this or ask questions? A: First, you don't need to register. I wrote this for my own BBS and if you like it then feel free to use it. If not, then life goes on anyway and I'll get over it. Voice - 9 to 5 eastern time - area (617)-727-5550 extension 4503 BBS Area (617)-451-5327 (28.8 and 2 nodes 8,N,1) Compuserve mail - 74247,1034 Internet - CHC@DELPHI.com Other - Joe's Bar. Lastly, I gotta tell you that the program is free and I nor any other entity in the Universe takes any responsibility for anything. It works for me and it should work for you. December 15, 1994 - Charles Crawford.