Article Directory Software - Article Friendly Script Review

When I created my first article directory, there was a certain sense of pride, a pride which I didn't feel from creating my regular websites. I don't know if it's because I have always loved the publishing industry (I used to want to be a journalist and did my work experience at school in a publishing house). But there it was - real pride.

I used a paid content management system to create that directory, and it had its' problems. For one, the article submission procedure wasn't that good. Authors had to go through several pages, and it wasn't as intuitive as a one page submission. But more than that, I eventually decided I would go with a purpose built article directory software script. The features in these, even the free ones, were much more suited to my purposes.

I looked at the free article directory script by Article Dashboard. I've submitted to many of the article directories, and this is a very popular script, so I knew how it looked from an author's point of view.

It's a nice looking script, but it suffers a big problem in that it is not maintained. Because of this, security is a big problem. If you look through the forums and the search engines, you might find a lot of people complaining about their sites being hacked, and other problems.

Your article directory is part of your business. You really don't want it left to that, not with the time you'll be putting into maintaining and approving articles, and marketing it.

During my searches, I came across Jan Michaels' Article Friendly. You can see this article directory software in action at my site Article Health And Fitness. I've customized the colors of this, which just takes redoing some of the graphics and playing around with the CSS sheet. If you've customized a blog theme, you'll be fine with this.

Jan is very active with his script. It's been updated twice in the past year, and both times they were big upgrades, with a lot of features added.

Just as an example, there were 34 changes in the newest update. These include things like:

- Optimized sql queries (good for shared hosting environments!)
- Decreased server resource usage on front and backend significantly (ditto)
- Added mass email throttling option in admin (ditto again!)
- Added updated adsense code to show 5 ads in left nav
- Added ability of admin to set number of featured authors thru admin site settings
- Added ability of admin to turn on/off auto approval of article marketer and iSnare submitted articles
- Added Approve Unapproved articles by checklist to admin
- Added Delete Unapproved articles by checklist to admin
- Added Delete articles by keyword (great for niche sites getting lots of irrelevant articles)
- Added author spell checking on article submission page
- Added mod_rewrite code for "SEO Friendly" article & author pages (you won't see this on my article directory as I haven't upgraded my script yet)
- Added Dropdown list to search/edit categories
- Improved default page style and layout
- Added enhanced error handlers to email admin on database errors and show nice page to users

He has a forum, and listens to what people want in his script. Jan has helped me personally with problems I've had to do with my particular hosting at the time, and when I was trying to get the articles sent directly from Article Marketer. He's always replied promptly, and he's very friendly. The script is aptly named!

Bottom line - this directory software comes highly recommended if you want to create your own article directory. All the important features are there for authors, and there's some great features in the admin as well. The script is very reasonably priced, and you are entitled to upgrades.

You can find Jan's Article Friendly script here.