Case Studies

Profile Manager Premium Case Study for A Personal Site
By Steve

As a Web designer, I am always on the lookout for interesting and useful CGI scripts. When a project came up to put together a gay & lesbian contact site, I already had a list of the more useful (and economical) profile scripts on offer, and the first task was to sieve through them to determine which would be of use, bearing in mind their functionality and overall adaptability.

I'd come across Profile Manager Premium from www.interlogy.com some months earlier while searching through various CGI sites. The recommendations looked good, and the demo of the script worked well. I downloaded their free copy (with fewer functions) but decided that with a little tweaking here and there, I could make the full script do that which I wanted.

When buying CGI scripts, it's always a little worrying that they're not going to perform as well as they should. It's been a case of 'once bitten, twice shy' on many an occasion, but with Interlogy.com I had no worries. Their back-up service is second to none. Aytekin Tank - the author of the three profile scripts on offer - responds almost immediately to any email sent to him. Bearing in mind that I'm in the UK and he is on the eastern seaboard of the USA, there's always going to be a delay due to time-zone differences. However, this proved no problem at all in setting up the script to my liking and getting it to mould into the overall look and feel of the new Web site that I was designing. I guess that, with Aytekin's help, the whole process took a little less than a week from start to finish. The problems were not that the script would not work (this is always a worry, of course but I had no problems at all on this occasion - Profile Manager Premium worked first time!) but on how to adapt it to suit my own purposes. There are obviously no US States here in the UK, so that was problem number one. However, Aytekin talked me through adapting the 'States' page to become 'UK towns'; again, once done, this section of the CGI script worked first time. A few more problems arose, but none of these were major. A first reaction is to blame the script itself if something doesn't work. However, it's often a case of the user not entirely reading and following the instructions given. I'm sure that Aytekin understands well the problems that can arise from time to time, as, as well as an FAQ page being on offer on his site, he backs up these frequently asked questions by email calmly and with examples - not losing his patience once! Nor was I made to feel inadequate in asking these questions!

The Site and script has been running but a short time. It often takes quite a while for a site to become popular, and for its name to be passed around. Although the script will have limitations when sufficient members join and the database becomes too large for efficient use, I know that I will eventually be able to update easily and cost-effectively to the more powerful MySQL version. However, that's for the months and possibly, years ahead. The security is the knowledge that I have Interlogy.com behind me at all times!