Xaraya 2.0.0 beta 1 installation quick guide

A few days ago the first beta version of the new Xaraya 2.0.0 (b1) has been released. Here is a quick screenshot tour of the installer and the installed system in brief.

Preparing installation

As you can see in the release notes, there are some changes in directory structure. Pay attention to the changes when copying the files to the web server.

1. Download the new Xaraya 2.0.0 beta 1
2. Extract the downloaded archive, tar -tjvf xaraya-2.0.0-b1.tar.bz2
3. Copy it to your web server: "lib" directory (old "include") is now outside "html", and you must keep this structure
4. The install process complained about a missing text file, so I downloaded it and copied to the same dir as you can see in the download URL: http://www.xaraya.com/documentation/phpxref/includes/transforms/convtables/iso-8859-1.source.txt (Save as "lib/transforms/convtables/iso-8859-1", remove the ".source.txt" extension.)
   

   Error: 2: PHPException
   Normal Xaraya error processing has stopped because of an error encountered.
   
   The last registered error message is:
   
   File     : ......../lib/xaraya/transforms/xarCharset.php
   Line     : 280
   Code     : 2
   Message  : fopen(../lib/transforms/convtables/iso-8859-1) 
   [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: 
   No such file or directory
   

5. Grant the usual web server write privileges to var/cache/templates/, database, rss
6. Delete all .php files and "CACHEKEYS" from var/cache/templates. Maintainers forgot them in the archive, which may stop your web server from writing to them.
7. Grant web server write privileges to var/config.system.php
8. Make sure you have "php-xsl" package installed
9. Now point your browser to the "install.php" file in the root (or html) folder

Running installation

Click the images to enlarge.

Installation has received a new very nice theme, based on the current www.xaraya.com design.

You can choose between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-2 English setups. I can't imagine why we still need anything else than UTF-8.

On the second page you will have to accept the GPL license.

Third page is also very similar to the Xaraya 1.x installer, it checks some system settings and configuration, directory write permissions, installed PHP modules and allows to continue if everything is fine.

On the 4th screen you can specify database name, user name and password and create the database if you are using MySQL and you have enough privileges.

Besides MySQL you can choose Postgres and SqlLite. Oracle and MS SQL is grayed out with comment "(Not supported) [Not available]".

That's funny. "Hey you don't have this software! But even if you had, you couldn't use it." ;-)

The fifth screen, creating the administrator account.

The sixth installation screen displays the site configuration selection, where "Community site" is the only available option at this time.

The GUI contains a weird button here, it has always been weird on my Firefox3/Linux in Xaraya 1.0 too. The text did not fit in the input box length. Now there is a huge dropdown arrow on the left side. When I try to "open" it, the gray selection appears as seen on screenshot.

Styling form controls is considered harmful - someone said. ;-)

The 7th screen grants public access to the installed site or revokes it if you wish.

The last installation screen displays a summary and allows you to go to configure modules, blocks or just launch the site.

Xaraya 2.0.0 - codenamed Jamaica welcomes you.

Launching the installed site

If everything goes well, you'll see this screen after the successful installation:

First I thought it's a "design feature" to have a thin front page, but then I realized the right margin is specified way too wide. Once the browser is enlarged (this shot was taken on about 800px) the content area will grow proportionally but the right margin won't grow or reduce.

Of course it would be better to use a small, percentage specified width for real esate killer margin.

Update: the login block appears on the reserved space. So I think theme will be updated similar to Xaraya Classic in the future, which recycles the empty space when right blocks group is empty!

This is what you can see on 1280px wide screen. The content area now grows to about 600 pixels, which makes me feel stupid to waste money on the 19" monitor, I could use an old 14" instead! ;-)

Best would be to avoid such space-wasting margins.

In base system settings you can see time zone configuration.

Server time zone and host time zone. Will be interesting to learn what that is. (I've just implemented time zone support in our proprietary CMS, it was not fun, believe me.)

Most of the system looks quite similar to Xaraya 1.x, so it will be easy to switch.

In the Modules module you will realize that this version comes with core modules only. No content management (except Dynamic Data).

The following modules are available:

authsystem, base, blocks, dynamicdata, installer, mail, modules, privileges, roles, themes.

The Dynamic Data module comes with an experimental "database schema editor", which may not be included in future versions. You can view your database tables, columns, modify, add, delete columns, etc.

Users and Groups (roles) are now completely handled via the Dynamic Data module. On this screenshot you can see the dataobject definition of the "User". Well, that looks quite interesting! I was sure Dynamic Data can do a lot more than I ever used.

The last screenshot is from the Roles module. Unfortunately the GUI consistency on action icons didn't improve. Some modules use action links on the right side, some use links on the listed items' name, but for example this one uses graphical icons with tooltips. I don't know which is the best. I don't like icons if they are not self-explaining. E.g. an icon of the "Delete" action is easy to recognize, but icon to "Test privileges" may cause some headache.

Summary

The important improvements are of course behind these screenshots. I am very excited to see that Xaraya 2.0.0 core will support an object oriented API, it will use PHP's XSLT engine to render the output (BlockLayout stays in place, but has been updated to use the built in XSL library), exceptions are handled by PHP5 too. I appreciate the hard work done by the developers and all contributors!

Improving Xaraya to PHP 5's features is as important as it was to improve PHP with those features.

I am afraid of data loss.

Always with Xaraya. If everything is set to UTF-8, the website, MySQL database server's defaults, the language selected at installation time of Xaraya, the client connection, the terminal window, the data in the database should not look like on this sceenshot.

Árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép

See related bugreport

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                       |
| character_set_connection | utf8                       |
| character_set_database   | utf8                       |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | utf8                       |
| character_set_server     | utf8                       |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'collation%';
+----------------------+-----------------+
| Variable_name        | Value           |
+----------------------+-----------------+
| collation_connection | utf8_general_ci |
| collation_database   | utf8_unicode_ci |
| collation_server     | utf8_unicode_ci |
+----------------------+-----------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

External links

Xaraya 2.0.0 beta 1 release announcement