Installation/Setup
From Lanius CMS Wiki
Contents |
Requirements
Lanius CMS is written in an interpreted language, PHP, hence it can run on different architectures and operative systems.
The minimum system software requirements are:
- a web server with PHP4 (v4.3.3 or superior), PHP5 (v5.1 and above) or PHP6 (experimental support)
- at least 10.5 MB of hard disk storage space for installation (additional disk space for user files is necessary)
- a database engine (or alternatively write access for SQLite or the embedded flatfile database Gladius DB)
- a web browser (JavaScript support is not mandatory)
Server
If you're installing on your home or office computer (for local testing only), there are a number of packages (made of Apache server, MySQL database & PHP scripting language) for the various operating systems that you can use with Lanius CMS.
To see a table with most popular *AMP distributions, see Installation/AMP
The longer and more detailed way is to install each of the components separately and configure them all, so they can work together.
Most Linux distributions already come up with a pre-configured LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server available for use as a part of the standard installation. Alternatively, it may be available as an add-on, again tailored to your particular flavour of
Linux distro, from the project home page. Often the constituent components can be managed separately, instead of those installed as a "full package".
On remote (hosted or dedicated) webservers, the configuration and availability of these applications will depend on the host provider or the operating system that is installed on the webserver. The variation that can occur between providers and OS can be significant and is outside the scope of this documentation. If you encounter a server problem while using Lanius CMS, please check the Lanius CMS official forum to see if other users are also experiencing the same issue and what their solution was. If you still can't find any solution, you need to contact your host provider to request additional information about server configuration.
Getting server information
Lanius CMS has been developed to use the most common PHP extensions; you will not need any specific additional extension in order to use it. XML support is granted through AnyXML, and will work on any PHP4/PHP5 host configuration.
During your setup you might need to check some server-related or PHP-related setting; you can always check PHP version by running the following code snippet:
<?php phpversion(); ?>
Information about installed AMP package should be available using the following code snippet:
<?php echo $_SERVER["SERVER_SOFTWARE"];?>
If you want to view a full PHP Information report, use instead the following code snippet:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
Database
Lanius CMS can run with just about any database system (see Database).
If you do not have a professional database system installed, for example MySQL, you can use SQLite (embedded in PHP5) or the embedded flatfile database, Gladius DB (if you have the necessary write permissions for the webserver user/process).
Some database systems are not enabled by default on PHP. Lanius CMS will report a red item for them in the installation stage or in the configuration panel; if you want to enable them, search the PHP manual for the relative extension and install and configure it.
Internet browser
Lanius CMS can be used with the most popular web browsers:
- Firefox (any version)
- Internet Explorer 6+
- Opera (any version)
All of the third party software used in the Lanius CMS core also supports those web browsers listed above.
Preparations
Lanius CMS can be downloaded for free at the Downloads page; before downloading the latest version of Lanius CMS, read the appropriate release news on the Lanius CMS Official Website.
Installation packages
Lanius CMS installation package comes in different archive formats:
- 7zip, which currently offers the best compression rate
- tar.gz, gzipped TAR format
- zip, a solid zip archive
- veloce-sfx zip, which contains the Veloce script (PHP archive extractor) and the tar.gz installation archive
Deployment
Once you have downloaded a Lanius CMS installation package you will need to extract the contents of the archive into a directory within your web server's document root or your public HTML directory which will then be configured for usage with your web server. You may find it helpful for future administration to create a specific directory in your web server's document root into which you place the Lanius CMS files, eg "www", "laniuscms", "pub" etc.
If your web server is Apache and your Operative System is Linux, the document root directory may be called /var/www/html/ or /usr/local/apache/htdocs/ (it is different depending on the specific distribution you are using).
If you are using Windows as the Operative System the directory is usually called c:\inetpub\wwwroot with the Internet Information Services web server, or c:\apache group\apache\htdocs with Apache.
Alternatively if you downloaded the file to your local computer and unpacked it locally use a FTP program to upload all files and directory structure to your server. Make sure all PHP, HTML, CSS and JS files are sent in ASCII mode and image files (GIF, JPG, PNG) in BINARY mode.
If you do not have direct access to the web server and if you have to transfer files via FTP or SCP (only to mention two), then you may choose to upload only the tar.gz package to the webservers root directory or to the directory you have created, and then use the Veloce script to remotely force the extraction via PHP. This method is much faster than the normal FTP/SCP remote upload of an extracted Lanius CMS installation package, but it will only work if you have write permissions for the web process (and it is common that on some servers the web server process cannot write to files, or cannot write to files/directories owned by the FTP process). For uploading files we recommend Filezilla or WinSCP.
Standard upload
- Extract package content locally
- Set your FTP client mode to auto
- Connect via FTP to your host
- Upload all extracted files and directories into your root path or directory under which you would like to have Lanius CMS installed
- Assign enough file permissions to all uploaded files and directories (if possible) so that the user being impersonated by PHP will be able to modify such files. The relative file mode value is usually 0777 or 0755
- Close the FTP connection
Remote upload
See Veloce script.
Database creation
Lanius CMS needs a database management system (DMS) with a database, you can use a common DMS like MySQL (MySQL is the de-facto standard for high-traffic web sites) or the built in flatfile DMS Gladius or SQLite (with PHP5) for those sites that do not offer third party sytems like MySQL (most free hosts).
Your hosting service, if included in the hosting package, would normally provide you with the details for connection to an installed database like MySQL. However you may be able to carry out that task using an installed utility like PhpMyAdmin (check with your provider) or via the examples below.
MySQL If you don't have yet a MySQL database, you can execute the following statement from the console or any other SQL execution facility:
CREATE DATABASE lcms DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
If you would like to execute this statement from within PHP, you can create a small PHP file and run it through your web browser:
<php
$db = mysql_connect(...); // connection procedure
mysql_query('CREATE DATABASE lcms DEFAULT
CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci');
?>
If you already have a MySQL database, you can convert existing database tables encodings to UTF-8 using the following PHP snippet:
<php
$d_dbname = 'lcms'; // your database name
mysql_query("ALTER DATABASE `$d_dbname` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci");
$res = mysql_query("SHOW TABLES FROM `$d_dbname`");
while($row = mysql_fetch_row($res)) {
$query = "ALTER TABLE {$d_dbname}.`".current($row)."` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8
COLLATE utf8_general_ci";
mysql_query($query);
$query = "ALTER TABLE {$d_dbname}.`".current($row)."` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
COLLATE utf8_general_ci";
mysql_query($query);
}
?>
Flatfile database systems
If you've decided to use SQLite or Gladius DB you do not have to create database files manually as they will be created automatically during the installation process. The only thing you have to do is to make sure that you have set proper write permissions for the install/ directory. You are encouraged to always check that your database is using the Unicode UTF-8 collation for the Lanius CMS database, as this software uses internally and externally this encoding and using it in the database will prevent encoding corruption.
Installation
Lanius CMS installation does not require any programming skill. Once installed the CMS will be ready to perform the most common tasks like adding/editing content and managing photos or file downloads. The simple web-based interface allows users to add new press releases or news items, manage staff pages, job listings, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on the website. To start the installation process open your web browser ( List of supported browsers) and go to the URL address where you've extracted Lanius CMS files (for example http://localhost/laniuscms/, which will automatically redirect you to install/index.php location.
