The Website Saga -...

So I finally got CMS Made Simple going properly on this site. It's been an educational experience to say the least.... Working via ftp is a painful process, but thank god I've got a good ftp client (konqueror) and a good editor that will work over ftp (kate). It makes things much easier.

I initially registered for 000webhost's free account with a name called 'techcom' (the company I registered years and years ago, and continue to use).... so my url was like techcom.net76.com (using one of 000webhost's free domains). That went well, I then logged into the control panel and created a database.... so far, so good.

I then tried using the file manager tool in cpanel to expand the cmsmadesimple-1.4-beta2_base.tar.gz file. And although this mostly worked, some files didn't get generated for some reason. I was getting all kinds of errors, and when I looked into it, there were files with a size of 0 bytes, that should've actually had something in them.... Dammit, this wasn't gonna go as easy as I hoped.

So i fired up konqueror, and logged into the ftp account that I was given. I then proceeded to delete any files that had been expanded by the cpanel file manager tool (because I couldn't trust them)... and upload the files myself via ftp. This took for freaking ever, but eventually it finished, and I was ready to start the install process.

So I get the installer going, select the appropriate language (it's cool now that the installer supports languages other than english), and got to the first page... this is when the interesting stuff started.

The session save path tests all worked, php is running as an apache module, and safe mode was off, and php's memory limit was fine, at least for a while, but there were still a couple of red flags on the install. Specifically the max_execution_time, the post_max_size, and the uploads_max_filesize parameters were set way too low.

So after some googling, and looking in the CMS Made Simple forums, I finally figured out how to edit my .htaccess file to adjust some of this stuff. I created a new file called .htaccess and added these lines:

php_value max_execution_time 60
php_value post_max_size 10M
php_value upload_max_filesize 10M

Clicking on the 'try again' button brought me back to the language selection page in the installer.... that's a bit odd, so I made a mental note to fix that before the final release of CMS 1.4... but on refreshing the page, now I got green or yellow markers, and I was set to go on.... yahoo.

The rest of the installation went through without a hitch. Of course, I had to change the permissions on the tmp, uploads and module directories, and stuff, but that was to be expected. I even got the admin login information email from the site... so now I know that this site uses php's mail() function to send mail, that came in handy for the next step.

I then went into the admin console of my new CMS install, and went straight to CMS Mailer. I changed the mail method to "mail", hit submit, and then entered an email address into the test field, clicked on the funky button, and a few seconds later the CMS Mailer test message showed up in my inbox.... woot!

The final step I did at that time, before starting to add content, and tweak templates, and all that stuff was to setup mod_rewrite and pretty urls. This was a simple two step process. The first was opening up the htaccess.txt file from the CMS doc directory, and copying some lines into my already existing .htaccess file. Here's what it looks now:

php_value max_execution_time 60
php_value post_max_size 10M
php_value upload_max_filesize 10M

Options -Indexes
ServerSignature Off
Options +FollowSymLinks
#
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
#
#Sub-dir e.g: /cmsms/
RewriteBase /
#
# 301 Redirect all requests that don't contain a dot or trailing slash to
# include a trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.
RewriteRule ^(.*) %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
# Rewrites urls in the form of /parent/child/
# but only rewrites if the requested URL is not a file or directory
#
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?page=$1 [QSA]
</IfModule>

Then I edited my config.php file and changed the pretty url settings according to the documentation. Take a look:

#------------
#URL Settings
#------------
#Show mod_rewrite URLs in the menu? You must enable 'use_hierarchy' for this to work for modules
$config['assume_mod_rewrite'] = true
 
#Extension to use if you're using mod_rewrite for pretty URLs.
$config['page_extension'] = '.html'
 
#If you don't use mod_rewrite, then would you like to use the built-in
#pretty url mechanism?  This will not work with IIS and the metadata tag
#should be in all of your templates before enabling.
$config['internal_pretty_urls'] = false
 
#If you're using the internal pretty url mechanism or mod_rewrite, would you like to
#show urls in their hierarchy?  
$config['use_hierarchy'] = true
 

After reloading my frontend page, and surfing to a couple of different pages, I saw that the urls were all working properly, and everything was great. I now had a perfectly working setup of CMS Made Simple on a free web host, or so I thought.

But that's another story...