Installing a DotClear2 blog (beta) on Gandi AI

Installation time: 10-15 minutes

It's wise to have a database dedicated to your blog. Let's go crazy, and call it “blog”.

If you don't (yet) know how to go about this, please read this tutorial.

You have a choice here. For “neatness'” sake, such applications are generally placed in a folder within the www sub-domain (www.example.com/blog) or in a specific sub-domain of its own (blog.example.com).

Easy! Just make sure the you create a specific folder for the store (as in www.example.com/blog)

Two things to do:

• Configure your server for this sub-domain, as explained in this tutorial.
• Configure your sub-domain to point to the server you have just configured, as explained in this tutorial.

This is the option we will be using in the rest of the tutorial.

To begin with, we need to download it. At the time of writing, the latest version of the beta was the 7th.

Nothing beats the official site to get the initial compressed file. I therefore recommend this link.

Then select the file type you prefer, .zip or .tar.gz.

Now that you've downloaded the file onto your favorite hard drive, decompress it. You now have a folder (let's rename it blog) containing all of the DotClear2 files.

Launch your favorite FTP client (we recommend FileZilla) and log in as admin onto your server. Then, open the folder corresponding to the VirtualHost you had initially defined.

In our example, the path of the FTP would therefore be:

/srv/d_my-gandai-ai/www/blog.example.com/htdocs

…that is, unless you've changed the initial configuration of the web files. If that's the case, however, I'm assuming you knew what you were doing. :)

At this stage, we can upload the blog files onto your server.

• If you created a blog.example.com kind of virtual host, you will want the blog to come up as the front page (i.e. not within a folder in the sub-domain) and you should therefore upload the content of the blog folder into the htdocs folder of your sub-domain.

• If you're not a fan of sub-domains and prefer a good old example.com/blog, then you need to upload the complete folder into htdocs (or another folder if you want).

For DotClear2 to configure properly, a specific folder will require specific rights. In most cases, to change these rights with your FTP client, all you need to do is right-click on the file concerned and chose the right term in the menu (could be Rights, CHMOD, Properties…). Supposing you were using FileZilla, this is what you should do:

Right-click the concerned file and select “File Attributes…”. The window that has just opened gives you two different methods to change the file rights: boxes to tick and numeric values.

The point of the tutorial not being to teach the numeric values of rights in UNIX, let's just say you can simply replace the numeric value by 777.

The folder that will necessarily need its rights changed is:

Cache

The installation is done via your FTP client, still.

First, you need to open the file called config.php.in which is in the inc/admin/ path of your DotClear directory. Rename the file as “config.php”, without the .in at the end.

Then, open the file (using Notepad or equivalent). Below a block of text about licensing (framed by lines entitled BEGIN LICENSE BLOCK and END LICENSE BLOCK), you'll see some lines of codes which you'll need to edit by adding relevant info in right places.

For example:

// Database driver (mysql, pgsql, sqlite)

define('DC_DBDRIVER','--mysql--'); 

Here the element to add (mysql) is between two dashes (but don't put dashes when you edit the file, I just put them there so you could spot the element more easily. :)

Provide the corresponding info for each field as follows:

DC_DBDRIVER: mysql

DC_DBHOST: localhost

DC_DBUSER: the user name you had defined when you created a database for the blog

DC_DBPASSWORD: the password associated to this user name

DC_DBNAME: the name of the database you had created, at the beginning of this tutorial i had called mine blog

DC_DBPREFIX: the table prefix for DotClear2. Unless you already have an application using this prefix (unlikely), you can leave this field with its default value.

DC_MASTER_KEY: indicate a “random” sequence of numbers and letters, which will define the encryption of your data

DC_ADMIN_URL: the URL for the admin directory. For example blog.example.com/admin

The following fields can be left with their default values.

In our case, the code for the config.php page would be filled in like this:

Then go to DotClear's installation page in your web browser (at blog.example.com/admin/install for example).

After having provided the required contact info, you will be given a login (admin) and a password.

Congratulations, your DotClear2 blog is ready to be configured. The official DotClear2 documentation only exists in French for the time being, but could still help, who knows. :) Also, you could visit the non French speaking forums on the official DotClear website for more info on how to manage your brand new blog.

Enjoy!