What is Glossword?

Glossword is the software for creating online multilingual dictionaries, glossaries, encyclopedias.

Additionally, Glossword allows to create custom multilingual nested pages, so you can use the software to make a web-site.

What features Glossword?

Basic features:

  • Adding terms to dictionary by several people at the same time.

  • Support for 485 languages.

  • Changing current visual theme and interface language by a vizitor.

  • With UTF-8 encoding, multiple languages can be used in a one dictionary at the same time.

  • The ultimate guarantee of displaying web-pages in any browser due to certified W3C XHTML 1.1 code and CSS 2.1 compliance.

  • Fast search engine can search cross words typed in any language, including Chinese.

  • Indexing and searching through millions of definitions.

  • Advanced search capabilities, stop words, query language.

  • Query words highlighting in results.

  • True transcription (e.g. 'dikʃ(ə)nri, IPA standard). No self-made emulations needed.

  • Defining accents for words (e.g. fbrika).

  • Architecture optimized for creating multiple dictionaries with one installation.

  • Printer-friendly version for a definition text.

  • Glossword is free of charge and distributed under GPL license.

For authors

  • Setup Wizard allows installing, upgrading, and uninstalling the software.

  • Highly customized visual themes with HTML-templates, CSS stylesheets and additional multicolumn rendering mode for the list of terms.

  • Visual themes editor.

  • Automatically generated alphabetical index for dictionary.

  • All HTML-code is optimized by special function before output to reduce page size and to save time for a visitor.

  • Export/Import dictionaries in XML and CSV format.

  • Export/Import topics in XML format.

  • Export/Import visual themes in XML format.

  • Export/Import custom pages in XML format.

  • Powerful administrative interface (DHTML, JavaScript).

  • Multilevel, multilingual topic structure with custom ordering.

  • Administrative interface includes online help notices, which gives you information about current page and possible actions.

  • "Activate anti-leecher" option will encode all URLs for terms to protect them from grabbing by automated process. This option is unique cross all web-applications.

  • Authorization module gives 14 types of permissions per user to manage topics, dictionaries, terms, special system events.

  • Export dictionaries works as extension and you may use third-party extensions in future to export dictionaries into PDF, RTF, LaTeX, HTML or anything else. SQL, XML, CSV included by default. Additionaly available extension export into wordlist.

For developers

  • Build-in support for mod_rewrite module of web server Apache allows to run dictionary with very short URL without parameters after question-mark and. It is used for better compatibility with search engines also.

  • Configurable 2-level cache engine improves productivity for an HTML-output and caches results from SQL-queries.

  • Invisible links to e-mails against mail robots.

  • Internal logging system.

  • Every comprehensive task, such as re-counting the number of added terms per user, for example, runs separately and it helps to balance server load.

What is required for Glossword?

Installation of Glossword 1.x requires the following:

  • Web server (Apache or IIS or other).
  • PHP version 4.3.3 or newer (5.x recommended).
  • Database MySQL version 3.23.20 or newer (5.0.x recommended).
  • 2.0 MBytes of disk storage.

Installation Wizard automatically detects current PHP settings and reports if any problems were found.

To install Glossword on a computer with operating system Windows 2000/XP/2003 it is recommended to use the program Glossword WAMP, which installs all required applications (Apache, MySQL, PHP).

How to install Glossword?

From the local computer to a remote hosting:

  • Unpack the package ‘glossword-1.x.x.tar.bz2’ to local machine.

    Use a tool like 7-Zip [1] to extract the ‘tar.bz2’ or ‘.7z’ file.

  • Upload the contents of ‘/glossword’ directory to your web server.

  • Set writing permissions for directory ‘glossword/gw_temp’. It can be done with any FTP-client software or by command line:
    # cd /usr/local/apache/htdocs/glossword
    # chmod 0777 gw_temp (permissions are drwxrwxrwx)

    It is possible to use another temporary directory, but it must be readable by web-server and it must be additionaly defined in file ‘/glossword/inc/config.inc.php’.

    Set writing permissions for file ‘/glossword/db_config.php’:
    # chmod 0666 db_config.php (permissions are -rw-rw-rw-).

    Index of /usr/local/apache/htdocs/glossword
    1. File/Folder Name         Required CHMOD Value
    2.    [DIR] gw_addon        -
    3.    [DIR] gw_admin        -
    4.    [DIR] gw_install      -
    5.    [DIR] gw_locale       -
    6.    [DIR] gw_temp         0777
    7.    [DIR] gw_xml          -
    8.    [DIR] img             -
    9.    [DIR] inc             -
    10.    [DIR] lib             -
    11.    [DIR] templates       -
    12.          .htaccess       -
    13.          favicon.ico     -
    14.          css.php         -
    15.          custom_vars.php -
    16.          db_config.php   0666
    17.          gw_admin.php    -
    18.          index.php       -
    19.          robots.txt      -

    Please note that chmod levels 0666 and 0777 are required unless your system uses another permissions. For example, if you are using CGIWrap that runs PHP scripts under the UID of the owner of the file, rather than under the UID of the web server, then chmod to 0644 and 0755.

Now open in browser ‘gw_install/install.php’ to start the installation process. If your site is www.domain.tld and Glossword is installed into root directory then the URL will be http://www.domain.tld/gw_install/install.php.

From the local computer to the local computer

The installation of software on the local computer with operating system MS Windows 2000/XP/2003:

Follow the instructions in the installation script. The installer will create all required database tables and administration account.

Now you should be able to start using your Glossword site immediately.

Glossword © 2002-2007 Dmitry N. Shilnikov
dev@wwwguru.net