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Coranto tutorial part 1 - Installing Coranto

01-19-2005 04:26 AM by SrNupsen

Welcome

Congratulations on choosing Coranto as your Content Management System. Whether you'll be running a small site with news once every month, or a 100,000 hits a day site with a large news database, Coranto will meet all of your needs. The program itself is very flexible through its system of Styles and Profiles, and in addition to this you also have the possibility to download and install numerous addons that add extra options and functionality to the core program. The addons are all very simple to install. Coranto also has a very active community where bugs are reported and fixed, features discussed and help given. Oh, and did I mention it's free?

1. READY?

Before installing Coranto, you need to make sure that you and your server are equipped for it. Here are the points you need to verify. If you don't understand one or several of them, ask your server administrator:

1.1 YOURSELF:

- You must be familiar with FTP. If you're not, it's easy to learn. Point your browser at http://www.magicz.com/tutorials/FTP.php, which is a good tutorial explaining how to use a program called SmartFTP.
- You must also know some HTML code. Once again, if you need to read up a bit, a short and comprehensible guide to HTML is available on http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/

If the web sites mentioned above should be unavailable, try a search at http://www.google.com for " ftp tutorial" or " html tutorial" and you will get plenty of help.

1.2 SERVER OPERATING SYSTEM:

NOTE: This does NOT concern the operating system you are running on your own computer, but the one being used on your web server.

- WINDOWS: If you're on a Windows server, you'll need a recent version of ActivePerl installed. On NT systems, the administrator may need to change permissions so that coranto.cgi can write to files in its directory. Or, more specifically: change the permissions on the Coranto directory so that IUSR_SERVERNAME has CHANGE access to it and the directory Coranto is running in has execute access in IIS. Contact your administrator if you are having permissions problems.
- UNIX: Coranto will work with virtually every Unix system. Some conditions apply, however: You MUST have Perl 5 or better installed. Coranto does not currently work with mod_perl.
- MAC: Coranto does not appear to work properly on MacOS 9 or lower systems (with MacPerl).

Check with your server administrator if you're not sure what operating system your server is running.

1.3 OTHER:

Your server must support CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts. If your server requires that CGI scripts have a .pl extension, you can simply rename coranto.cgi and viewnews.cgi to coranto.pl and viewnews.pl. No script changes are necessary. DO NOT rename nsettings.cgi or nsbk.cgi, as they are not meant to be run.
You must also obtain from your server administrator the following information:

- The path to Perl on your server
- The absolute path to the files in your home directory
- Your FTP login information

Now you are ready to install Coranto!

2. SET...

Installing Coranto is done in 4 steps, of which 2 are relatively easy:

2.1 DOWNLOADING THE CORANTO PACKAGE TO YOUR COMPUTER

The latest release of Coranto can be found at http://www.coranto.org. There you'll also find instructions for upgrading from an older version of Coranto or from Newspro. Just click the "Download" link and save the file to your computer. Then uncompress it in a suitable directory, using WinZip or your favourite decompression program.

2.2 MAKING SMALL BUT NECESSARY CHANGES

You should now open the two files coranto.cgi and viewnews.cgi in a simple text editor (such as Notepad). The first line in each file is #! followed by the path to perl on your server (replace the path that's there with the path you were given by your server administrator). Now save the two files.

2.3 UPLOADING THE CORANTO FILES TO YOUR WEB SITE

2.3.1 DIRECTORY AND FILE PLACEMENT

NOTE: If you need a quick explanation of the numbers used in the CHMOD commands, see Appendix A. If you will be running Coranto locally on your own PC or server, you may skip the upload part, but do note the directory information given below. First, get hold of a good FTP client. For Windows, I recommend SmartFTP, which is free for non-commercial use and can be found at http://www.smartftp.com. On a Unix server with shell access, you might want to use the ftp command line program (refer to unix documentation for further information). Gftp is also a very decent alternative; and should be easy to obtain from all major Linux distributions.

Now Use your FTP login information to connect to your FTP account. Then, to avoid any problems in the future:

- Create a directory called news (or whatever you like) either directly under your home directory or in another location that suits you. The important thing is: Keep it OUTSIDE your cgi-bin directory. Set the permissions for this directory to 755. This will be your NEWS directory.
- create a directory under your home web directory called cgi-bin, if it doesn't exist already.
- set the permissions for this directory to 755 (You can view the permissions informations by entering the View menu and then clicking "Select details" and "permissions").
- Create a sub-directory in cgi-bin/ called coranto, and set its permissions to 755. This will be your PROGRAM directory.

Now set your upload mode to ASCII (NOT binary). This is VERY IMPORTANT, as it's one of the most common mistakes newcomers do when installing Coranto.

- Upload all the files in the Corano package EXCEPT newsdat.txt to your program directory.
- Upload newsdat.txt to your news directory (yes, it should be 0 bytes).

2.3.2 PERMISSIONS

WINDOWS USERS: If you plan to run Coranto on a Windows 2000/NT installation, you normally won't have to set permissions on the files. However, you may need to ask your server administrator to make the files coranto.cgi and viewnews.cgi executable, and crcfg.dat, nsettings.cgi, nsbk.cgi, and newsdat.txt writable.
UNIX USERS: You need to apply the following permissions to your Coranto files:

 coranto.cgi CHMOD 755 
 viewnews.cgi CHMOD 755 
 crcfg.dat CHMOD 666 
 nsettings.cgi CHMOD 666 
 nsbk.cgi CHMOD 666 
 newsdat.txt CHMOD 666 

3. GO!!....?

3.1 ACCESSING CORANTO.CGI FROM YOUR BROWSER

Here comes the test to see whether you have followed instructions well so far. If you have set everything up correctly, you should now be able to run coranto.cgi from your browser. If your domain is http://www.yourdomain.com and you installed Coranto in the cgi-bin/coranto/ sub-directory, then try typing in http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/coranto/coranto.cgi in the address field of your browser and pressing Enter.

If Coranto presents you with its login screen, then you are ready to go to the next step. If, however, you are greeted with a 500 Internal Server Error or another not-so-nice message, please check the following before pulling your hair out:

- Did you upload in ASCII mode?
- Have you set all permissions correctly? Even if you have, try replacing 755 with 777 and vice versa or 666 with 777 or vice versa. Your news directory may also need 777 instead of 755.

If all this fails, try repeating the install, as for many people the second attempt is more likely to succeed than the first. Henrik Ahlén also has some nice tips on Common webserver and perl errors.

3.2 THE SETUP PROCEDURE

Congratulations! You are now past the most difficult part of the install, and Coranto will guide you from now on. Log in to Coranto with the user name "setup" (no quotes!) and the password field left blank. You don't need to check the box named "remember password". The setup is quite self-explanatory, but note that you'll not be able to customize anything before you accept the license. As you will see, Coranto tries to guess the path to your files. What a nice feature! Fill in all required information and click "Continue install" until you've finished. Now log in to your Coranto installation with the user name and password you selected during install.


You have now successfully installed Coranto, and may proceed to the next tutorial: "Displaying your first piece of news".

APPENDIXES

APPENDIX A: Explanation of permission settings

In Unix, permissions are set for all files and directories. These permissions decide what actions different people are allowed to take (read, write and so on) on each file and directory. Permissions are set for three types of users: Owner, Group and Other. For more info on this, search the net for a CHMOD tutorial. The following is an explanation of the permission numbers mentioned above, in the case that your FTP client does not support only specifying the numbers when setting permissions:

CHMOD number
666: Read and write for everybody
775: Read, Write and Execute for Owner, Read and Write for Group and Other
777: Read, Write and Execute for everybody

APPENDIX B: Where to go for help?

If you're stuck in a situation that's not covered in this tutorial, and have tried EVERYTHING without any luck, then you are welcome to search the forums at

http://www.coranto.org/forum/

or the archived forums of the old 'Unnoficial site' at

http://www.coranto.org/forum2/

There's a great chance that someone has had the same problem as you, and that your problem is solved in one of the forum threads.

If, however, that's not the case, post your problem in the forums. Be sure that you include the FULL error report generated by Coranto or your web browser, and the version of Coranto you're using. This will make it a lot easier for us to help you.

APPENDIX C: Credits and licensing

This tutorial is based on the Coranto setup file included in the package, as well as the work of numerous problem solvers in the Coranto support forums. You are permitted to distribute it freely, provided that it's not altered in any way. Neither the author of this document nor the makers of Coranto shall be held responsible for any damage caused by following (or not following) the instructions in this tutorial.