Member Login

Connect applications with single-sign-on to build communities

Installation from scratch

This installation instructions assumes that you do not have any applications installed in your domain and your database is empty so far. If you already run any applications and your database is not empty, conflicts can damage your data! Nevertheless, if you would like to try this installation, please backup all files stored in your root directory and make a backup of your database. If you do not know how to store files or make backups you probably would not be able to follow this instructions. You can ask me to do it for you (see contact) for charge or try to get help in forum.

Requirements

Server-Side requirements:

PHP >= 5
MySQL >= 4

Client-Side requiremens:

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In this documentation I explain how to start new community project from scratch. You will need some hours to be able to complete this tutorial but it will be very stable and easy customizable solution. We are intended to install five applications. Please pay attention to the versions of applications given in this instructions. If you are tough enough to install version different to mentioned here or you use your customized solutions - you can. In many cases it may work but you are on your own to solve issues if something goes wrong.

Content Management System CMS Made Simple 1.4 or higher
Forum Solution phpBB 3.0 or higher
Blogging Platform Lifetype 1.2.7 or higher
Picture Gallery Coppermine 1.4.18 or higher
Instant Messaging PHPFreeChat 1.1 or higher

The solution will integrate single-sign-on in all aplications. The demo of this solution is this site. You can also go to the project sites above and check out demo of each single solution. You are not required to install all applications (except for CMS Made Simple) listed above. Just choose one or two you would like to integrate in your community and omit installation of other products.

What do you need to start?

Domain for your project
Webhosting with:
- minimum 200MB of free webspace (while your community grows you will need more webspace!)
- ftp access
- php5 with (optional) soap extension installed
- mysql 4 or 5 installed

Search for provider thoroughly since community can last your server severly. You will need good performance and sane support.

MySQL database connect information:
- database host (probably port)
- database name (please ask your provider how you can create new database if you do not yet have one)
- database user
- database password

While creating database you have to pay attention to collation of your database. I use only utf-8 on my sites due to internalization therefore I always make collation of database to be utf-8. If you use other language than English in your project or even "mix" some languages - you will be thankful to utf-8. The collation is important right now since you will spend many hours afterwards trying to convert your database to other collation if you do not do it right at the very beginning.

Create database:

CREATE DATABASE `database_name` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Or change collation if database is already created:

ALTER DATABASE `database_name` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Email address configured for your project
Think about nickname, username and password for your applications. This is an account for your community, which corresponds to admin user in all installed applications. Due to restrictions in other applications do not place any special characters in username and make all letters small. Better start with the same nickname and username while integrating. You will be able to change your nickname and username after user is integrated bypassing the restriction described above.
Think about admin username and password for administration panel of CMS Made Simple
Think about username and password for .htaccess protection of your mofule

Take care about last two points. First of all it is something about security not to use "admin" as username. While installing applications your will be asked about mysql connection, email address and username/password. So figure out and write down the required information now or keep it in mind.

In this documentation I will use master as nickname and icmsadmin as login.

Since iCMSUser is a module of CMSMS you must start with installation of CMS Made Simple.