Installing Ovidentia on Gandi AI

Ovidentia is a widely used content management system (CMS) and groupware, commonly used by companies, associations, online communities, etc.

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

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/ovidentia) or in a specific sub-domain of its own (ovidentia.example.com).

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

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 was 1.0.14.

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

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

• If you created a ovidentia.example.com kind of virtual host, you will wantOvidentia 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 ovidentia 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/ovidentia, then you need to upload the complete folder into htdocs (or another folder if you want).

To begin with, you'll need to create a folder called upload within the ovidentia folder. This is where the files uploaded through the Ovidentia interface by your users will be stored on your server.

You can quite simply add a folder called upload in the path which corresponds to the Ovidentia files. I recommend that you copy and keep the exact path of this upload folder in your clipboard, since you will have to use it in a few moments.

In our example, this path would be:

/srv/d_my-gandi-ai/www/ovidentia.exemple.com/htdocs/upload/

Then, for Ovidentia to configure properly, certain folders and files will need 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 how the client would operate:

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.

In addition to the ovidentia folder itself, the following files and folders will need its rights changed:

/config.php
/install.php
/upload/      <== the folder you have just created

Using your web browser, open the install.php in your website's ovidentia folder. In our case, this wuld be:

ovidentia.example.com/install.php

1.

You are now on the first page of the installation. You'll need to give Ovidentia a couple infos.

Database host : localhost

Database name : the name of the database you had created at the very beginning of the tutorial. In your example, we had called it ovidentia.

Drop database : do not tick this option.

Login : the user name you had created along with the database.

Password : and its associated password.

Relative path to ovidentia core : you can leave the default value of this field.

Base url : here as well.

Upload directory: Give the FTP path to the upload previously created. In our example, this would therefore be:

/srv/d_my-gandi-ai/www/ovidentia.exemple.com/htdocs/upload/

2.

Once you have validated this step, you should see a confirmation message along with an automatically generated login and (not so subtle) password.

You will also be told to erase the install.php file from the ovidentia directory, which you can do still using your FTP client.

3.

You can then open your brand new Ovidentia interface. Log in using the username and password previously provided, and then click Options in the right-hand menu. You should immediately change the password to something more secure.

You're done! If you would like more info on how to run Ovidentia, please consult the Ovidentia website.