Installation

Since the documentation on our new software is sparse at best, I thought I would publish a series of articles on the installation and usage of Plogger for those of you who are willing to try it out. This post will describe the steps necessary to get Plogger up and running on your web server.

Installation:

First things first, download the binary and extract the data onto your hard drive. There is a directory structure embedded into the ZIP file so make sure that you preserve this organization when extracting. Once you’ve done this, upload the entire folder onto your web server using an FTP client.

Now that you have the software uploaded you need to run the installation script. Navigate to the URL http://www.yoursite.com/plogger/_install.php — for whichever path you choose to upload the script to. The installation script will prompt you for your MySQL database connection parameters and a few other basic pieces of information. If you haven’t created a MySQL database yet, you will need to create one manually or automatically by using phpMyAdmin (if installed on your server).

The installation script will attempt to set the permissions of the appropriate directories automatically. However, due to different configurations your server may not allow the script to perform these operations. In this case, the installation will inform you that it couldn’t perform the necessary CHMOD operations and you will have to do them manually. This can be accomplished using most basic FTP clients. Make the indicated changes on your permissions and try hitting the ‘install’ button again.

If the permissions on your directories are all properly set, the installation script will create the necessary tables and keys for your Plogger galleries.

At this point, the installation script will attempt to write your connection settings to disk. If it cannot perform this operation automatically, you will be given the contents of the plog-connect.php to write manually. Open up plog-connect.php in your favorite text editor, paste the given code into the file and upload it to your Plogger base directory.

If you followed all the instructions properly you should be all setup and ready to begin publishing your photo collection. Navigate to your administrative tools page by pointing your browser to http://www.yoursite.com/plogger/admin. You should login with the username and password that you provided to the installation script.

That’s it! Plogger is setup and ready to go. Part 2 will detail setting up your galleries and using the Plogger import tool to quickly publish your entire photo collection.

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You’re currently reading “Installation,” an entry on Solano Systems | Mike Johnson

Published:: 04.06.05 / 9am

Category:: Plogger

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About

Mike Johnson is a Minneapolis based web designer and developer, with a strong background in web application development and standards based design.

Mike is the Lead Developer of the popular open-source photo gallery Plogger, and holds a full time position as a Web Programmer and Product Developer for Twin Cities based Startup Sierra Bravo.

Patrick 04.10.05 / 10am

Apparantly there was some MySQL errors when installing. It seems they made some changes to the timestamp type after MySQL 4.1. It was all fixed by removing the default value on the table ´pictures´, field date_submitted.

Mike 04.10.05 / 2pm

Patrick, thanks for this! I will change the installation script tonight.

Patrick 04.11.05 / 3am

No problem, glad I can help. Product looks great and I am really happy I found it. It would help with some place to discuss stuff like this, maybe a forum? I am sure more people would be able to help and share ideas if they are all gathered at one place.

Darren 04.16.05 / 7am

What should the CHMOD settings be for a unix server? Tried altering manually but I am getting the same error message;

‘ * The path (./images) is not readable.
* The path (./thumbs) is not readable.
* The path (./uploads) is not readable.
* The path is not writable by the Web server.
* The path is not writable by the Web server.
* The path is not writable by the Web server.
* The path is not writable by the Web server.

David Taylor 04.16.05 / 12pm

When I go to http://www.noisyshinycrap.com/plogger/_install.php

I get:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/.sabriel/html/noisyshinycrap.com/plogger/_install.php on line 31

What am I forgetting?

Thanks.

David

Mike 04.16.05 / 2pm

David, try reuploading the _install.php file. Sometimes the files will only partially upload, thus giving you strange PHP parse errors.

Darren, do a CHMOD 777 on those directories and you should be fine. I’m not sure why it says the path is not writable by the web server 4 times like that at the end… did you copy and paste that exactly?

Darren 04.16.05 / 3pm

Mike, yes I copied and pasted it exactly - I have got rid of 3 of the ‘The path is not writable by the Web server’ messages when I realised I had not created the 3 directories.

I am just getting one ‘The path is not writable by the Web server.’ message and I have CHMOD 777 on all of the directories, not sure why it won’t continue :(

Any ideas?

David Taylor 04.16.05 / 3pm

Mike,

I got further by changing line 31 in _install.php from:

$output .= ‘’;

to:

Note the %5b.

Then I had to manually edit these lines in plog-connect.php:

$DB_HOST = “localhost”;
$DB_USER = “”;
$DB_PW = “”;
$DB_NAME = “”;

After that I am in and have successfully uploaded a photo but now the Plogger index.php doesn’t work.

Wordpress mangled the php lines but you get the idea.

Look at line 31 in _install.php in the default download and change %5b to [

OK, now how do I make the Plogger Gallery show up in a WordPress Page?

Mike 04.16.05 / 3pm

Check out my post “Configuration”, look down at “Integrating a Plogger Gallery”. You will have to manually add the code to your templates, I’m not sure there is way to add PHP statements through Wordpress, it will just render as plain text instead of parsing through the PHP interpreter. You could also refer to the “readme.txt” in the archive, it has basic instructions there.

Also, David, please note that those variables in your plog-connect.php file should contain your database connection parameters that you entered into the install script. Nothing will work without them.

It’s not clear to me what you changed in the _install script but it appears to not be working properly.

Line 31 should read $output .= '< form action="'.$_SERVER["PHP_SELF"].'" method="post">';

Does anybody know of a good WP Plugin that allows you to post code and HTML in your comments without WP mangling it or changing it?

David Taylor 04.16.05 / 4pm

OK, we are making progress here.

You omit to mention in your instructtions that your code is intimately tied to WordPress 1.5 and even requires the use of the same database as WordPress.

I seem to be able to see my nascent Plogger Gallery at:

http://www.noisyshinycrap.com/plogger

Next question. Clicking on the large image seems to attempt to download the original.

Now I undertstand why the uploads take so long.

How do I avoid the 404 on the large image and even avoid uploading the large image at all? I want an image gallery and don’t need to share my originals with the world.

Mike 04.16.05 / 4pm

David, the code isn’t tied to Wordpress 1.5 in any way. You can use the same database at Wordpress if you want to, but it is by no means required. If you wanted to create a new database for Plogger, you could. Some people only have one MySQL database on their hosting account, so sharing a database becomes a feature of conveinence.

As for the gallery being tied to the original photo, this is how the system works. If you are comfortable with PHP you could find the code that creates the link to the original image and remove it. If this feature was not in place, you would have to manually resize all of your photos before uploading them.

Your large original images are not getting a 404, but a “Forbidden” error. You need to change the permissions on your images directory. CHMOD 777.

Yipes!!! By doing CHMOD 777 on my images, clicking does indeed work and I get to a cool full-size image with a magnifier mode.

This is both good and terrifying. I can see the full detail in my shot and so can any other browser.

This raises two questions:

1. Can anyone in the world now steal or deface these images?

2. If the user is very new to the web, how do they get back to the postcard size view? Shouldn’t there be and arrow and “back to the Gallery” text.

Ennis 04.18.05 / 7pm

i can’t seem to get rid of the last “The path is not writable by the Web server.” error

Mike 04.18.05 / 8pm

Try commenting out line 65 of _install.php. This will manually remove the check in the install. It should go through, but I can’t guarantee it will work.

Greg 05.22.05 / 2am

I have a problem with the SQL Server. The Install Skript gives me the following:

Plogger could not connect to the MySQL host with the information you provided.

But of course these informations are valid and copypasted from my other configuration files.

Then I wrote the SQL Informations into plog-connection.php and invoked plog-connection.php with my browser and this skrikt gave me this error:

Plogger cannot connect to the database because: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

Does anybody know what to do here to make plogger run?

Thanks a lot,
Greg

Mike 05.26.05 / 12pm

Greg — The only thing I can think of that would be causing your problem is incorrect connection parameters. Did you copy the plog-connect.php code from the install script verbatim?

The plog-connect.php file is really simple, if it is throwing an error than the only possible problem is that your database name, password or username is incorrect.

Eric 06.08.05 / 10am

Just ran the installer and get the message telling me to create a gallery but when I click on the Manage tab it asks for username and password. After logging in again, I am brought back to the initial upload page with the same message. Clicking on any tab brings me to the login page again.

Hector 06.10.05 / 9am

I know this kinda vague, but I’m so new to this stuff. Anyway, Plogger installation went really smooth; I FTPed some photos in “uploads” dir; but when I try to use the “Import” feature, this error shows:

“500 Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@loroco.info and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.”

Mike 06.10.05 / 10pm

There are a few things here that could be going wrong. First, are you running a Unix-based server or a Windows-based one? The latter will not work at all.

Secondly, what version of MySQL and PHP is your server running? Can you login to your site with phpMyAdmin and see if the Plogger tables were created properly? Plogger requires MySQL 4.0 or better.

If you don’t know the answers to these questions — or how to find out — send this comment to your ISP and see if they can help you.

reno 07.09.05 / 12am

Hi,
I love plogger but am having a little trouble on the install.

1. installed plogger via web browser (no prob..using unix server with mysql/php)
2. login (no problem)
3. I get this message “Before you can begin uploading photos to your gallery, you must create at least one collection AND one album within that collection. Move over to the “Manage” tab to begin creating your organizational structure”
4. Click on ‘Manage”
RESULT: Takes me back to the Login Screen

BTW: Changed Permission to 777 as well to no avail on all folders/dir

Ideas?

BTW, I am using WP 1.5.1. Should I configure for wordpress and then try again to add/manage collection/album???

Thank you.

stix 07.20.05 / 8am

I get this while installing Plogger: “Plogger connected to the MySQL host, but could not find the database brlogc2_plogger.”… I’ve made the database with that name, added user and a password and so on…What’s the big deal, I know I’m doing something wrong;)
P.S. Permissions are set to 777 for all folders.

Thank you in advance.

Stix

stix 07.20.05 / 10am

Me again, problem solved, my bad (Of course):)

Danny 07.28.05 / 6pm

Hi there,

I setup Plogger without any problem until I try to import my first photos after uploading them.
I am getting the following error message:
——————————————————-
Failed to Render Thumb: GetImageSize(”/var/www/admin/../uploads/DSC00038.JPG”) failed in file “phpthumb.class.php” on line 1313 “/var/www/admin/../uploads/DSC00038.JPG” does not exist
——————————————————-
And when I browse to my website get almost the same error message:
——————————————————-
Failed: GetImageSize(”/var/www//images/DSC00038.JPG”) failed in file “phpthumb.class.php” on line 1313 “/var/www//images/DSC00038.JPG” does not exist
——————————————————-
But I am sure the file exists!

Do you have any idea howto fix this?

Thanks in advance,

Danny

Colin 08.07.05 / 9pm

I too am having the same issue as Danny. I would love to know how to fix this. It seems to be an issue in the phpthumb.class.php file.

My site is running on a windows server setup also, if that might have anything to do with it.

Colin

Mike 08.08.05 / 12pm

The problem is pretty simple actually. Plogger is not designed for Windows IIS. Plogger is passing a pathname with UNIX style forward slashes instead of Windows style back slashes. Consequently, phpThumb is looking for a file that cannot possibly exist.

We may add support for Windows servers at a later time.

morydd 08.25.05 / 2pm

When I try to install plogger on my local system, I go to the _install.php, fill in the data and click “Install” and am presented with a blank page. No error messages, no information, the source shows <html><body>&lt/body>&lt/html>
Nothing else appears. Any thoughts what would cause this?

Martin Hall 08.31.05 / 8am

The issue with the very last
” * The path is not writable by the Web server.”

Is caused by a missing thumbs folder (there are 2 of them your missing the one in the admin folder?) my ftp client like alot of others will not transfer null folders (empty ones) one way around it is to create a txt file with one line of txt and copy it to all empty folders.

Once uploaded delete the txt file. (worked for me)
;-)

Leen 09.01.05 / 7am

Hi, I’ve been trying to login for the longest time. I created a new MySQL Database but Plogger is still having problems loggging in me. Can someone please help me with this? Thank you.

Mike 09.09.05 / 12pm

Please direct installation based questions to the Plogger support forum.

Installation

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