Frequently Asked Questions About procedures to intall Siteseed on Unix like operating systems (Linux, Solaris, *BSD, etc)

setup.php just created two tables on the database!
 
 

After running http://my_site.ext/bo/setup.php and successfully logging in, the browser only shows the following:


Updating CSS table to v1.4.6+ structures...

Updating CSS_files table to v1.4.6+ structures...


and only the tables CSS and CSS_files are created on the database, instead of getting a first page to select between an initial layout for experienced users or first-time users.


The reason for this behaviour is very simple to explain. setup.php expects to create its own project database. If a database already exists, setup.php tries to update the existing database instead. If the database exists, but is void of tables, the upgrade is not very successful: just those two tables get created.


The solution is to drop any created databases and let setup.php create its own. Don't forget to create the user with the proper GRANT permissions to access that database (even if it doesn't exist)!

 
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Apache returns: "Your web server is ignoring your .htaccess file. Please check your web server configuration"
 
 

This is one of the most frequent questions and, strangely enough, one of the easiest to solve.

Open your Apache configuration file and simply add "AllowOverride All" on all directories where you have Siteseed installations (this may either be on the "DocumentRoot" or on the VirtualServers sections).

Apache defaults to "AllowOverride None".

 
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I don`t have/can`t find either "ImageMagick" or "wvware" for my system. Can I still use Siteseed?
 
 

Yes.

ImageMagick is a piece of (open source) software which does all kinds of graphic manipulations on files. It's extremely useful if you have to deal with journalists uploading 20 MB images without any real sense of what they're doing!

If you don't/can't have ImageMagick on your system, you will have to resize images "manually" before the upload (sure they've got acceptable sizes for Web images - around 10-30 KB is all right, jpg with a 75% ratio will be fine).

"wvware" is a piece of software which converts Microsoft Word documents to HTML.

Why do you need it? Well, it's not actually required to make Siteseed work. It permits you to upload Word files and have Siteseed convert them directly to HTML. Also, there is a very nice utility embedded into Siteseed called "visual editor", which looks like Word, and is much easier to use when you need to do fancy formatting... if you don't have "wvware" installed, you'll have to do the formatting using HTML tags.

(the RPM package for Red Hat Linux is called wv-...-rpm, so do a

rpm --query wv
to see if it's installed)

As said, they're not REQUIRED, they're just useful, but you can have all the power of Siteseed without having to bother with them.

 
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Can I run Siteseed on a web hosting (virtual host) service?
 
 

If you do not have root access your install.pl script must be hacked and the lines refering to group change on "images", "dm" and "cache" must be commented out.

From the siteseed mailing list:

From: plaureano@mail.mrnet.pt
To: siteseed@mrnet.pt
Subject: Re: Installation help please !!
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 17:51:36 +0000

On Friday 22 February 2002 16:44, you wrote:

> Unfortunately, i can't run anything else than windows on the old machine i
> owe at home, for i already tried to installed several linux distributions
> and it always smashed the whole things up after a while. That's why i'll
> first try the way Luis told me ... (For info, my remote server is a unix
> machine ...)
>
> I already and carefully read the install documentation, and some things
> seemed quite obscure, that i hope i'll be able to manage by now.

The lines on the install.pl script that may will cause problems for the
non-root user are:

118, 119
124, 125
141, 142

These atempt to setup the group of the webserver on directories "images",
"dm" and "www". This are the operations that require root previleges. If you
comment them out your install.pl will run fine on virtual hosts.

There are two ways of getting around this:

- Totally unsecure approach 1: chmod -R 777 images* dm* cache* (you can do it with no root previleges, but every other user in that machine will be able to access those directories with read/write)

- Totally secure/unsecure approach depending on the hosting service 2: ask root to setup those three directories with permissions 770 and chgrp them to the apache group (other users if apache is not chrooted will be able to write
on those directories using php but not directly. It SHOULD BE chrooted on a hosting service that has multiple users, but it is NOT in the vast majority of them because its way cheapper in terms of resources to have a shared apache/mysql instead of chrooted ones to each user: which would be a secure setup but no one cares...)

- Secure approach (on every hosting service): use ftp instead and keep permissions on 755 (usually the default in most servers) for those three directories. You loose a lot of the siteseed power (like uploading images and on-line resize) but you can have a secured site (if none of the other uses
scales its previleges and hacks the server - it's very, _very_ hard, to keep a linux server secure with multi-users with local shells).


> Thanks for your answer, and for the help you (all) provide :)

My pleasure! Hope you can get it running.

PLS


Note:

  • Security should be taken seriously and the only option that people on webhosting services have is really the ftp one. You loose a lot (disk caches, data mining and import of word documents and on-line image processing) but at least you will not get your site defaced.

  •  
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    May I use database names with predefined names?
     
     

    Almost all providers (virtual servers / hosting services) allow customers only to create DBs with predefined names, probably depending on their login or sth else). Just replace "The_name_of_your_project" (config.php) in $projecto="The_name_of_your_project"; with your dbname.

     
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