We have been overly excited about the release of the great works coming from the Wiccle Crew. Thanks guys. I wanted to take a moment and share our experience with Wiccle, and how we perceive the future with what we are seeing.

First off, the most major thing recognized by myself and team, is that this application was written with a large amount of common sense. The code is clean, the file structure is eloquent, the performance is amazing.

First round, we couldnt even get the right flipping files on wget. finally got that worked out. then i had to lodge an inquiry, the zip file would unpack into a subdirectory. Markus provided me with a link so that the files would unpack in the current directory. Not that its a big deal, but man I am lazy sometimes, and who really wants to mv * /path/to/where/you/want/files

The install (5 Steps) sweet.

So here is a little post about how we are approaching our 2nd round install. Created VPS using solusVM. Not using any control panel, wanted to run this one butt-nekkid, and see how she performs. There was some discusssion about the PITA of install phpmyadmin, and we considered running remote mysql. Well here we start out our build, php was v.5.1.x ugh. Ok off to the races to get php updated, apache was 2.1, gotta get this upgraded. Now its time to get things compiled and configured. I am not going to go into that one 'yet' because i have not determined the best performance configuration for wiccle. That is something we will be trying to put together in the future.

So here is our first challenge: we do not want to use the conventional path /usr/var/www/html. Why not? Dont know really, just dont wanna. Ok we create the VirtualHost and Directory Containers in httpd, running CentOS 5.5(Final) vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Setup the VirtualHost and Directories was not that big of a deal, but what was kicking our butt was DNS cache and the domain not resolving. Ok 3:00AM EST, we decided to take a rest, and let DNS do what it needs to do.

We setup /sites/domain/webroot, this is where we are comfortable, no other reason to set this up like this. DNS finally propogated, and wrote a quick little ditty about having made contact with the server. It really is always pleasant when you have sucess at doing these things. Now, I am sure that Markus and the Wiccle guys have a server config recommendation file somewhere, again, my laziness probably got me, and i never even looked for it. I know what i believe to be necessary on a dynamic site, not only for performance and functionality, but also for security. We built out on a php compile with FCGI+mod_suphp. Considered trying DSO, but quite frankly, file permissions on DSO are sometimes more trouble than its worth considering what we are giving up on performance.

Ok so9 we have apache updated, php is updated, now its time to give phpmyadmin a whirl. Hmmmm, yes i have done this before, but will tell you, cPanel/WHM, and DirectAdmin, will completely and utterly ruin a good server Admin. So we wear out yum for a while, kick in some custom repositories, and get things tweaked out the way it feels good, and ready for phpmyadmin. Yes i said that once already, but you are not going to believe the ease in which i found phpmyadmin to install. I actually found an installer script for phpmyadmin. It was not really that forgiving, but gave me some good ideas and told me that i was missing mbstring. You have to create a directory that is writable by the server and cp the config.example.inc.php, and then when the installer takes your parameters, it will save the config.inc.php back to the root of the phpmyadmin install.

One thing i would like to  mention here is that i tend to immediately change the long file names of these files right after i wget them onto the server. I dont like to type, and i get annoyed with'highlight and right-click". So a file name that is elongated immediately becomes a shortened version by me. So running through the installer script for phpmyadmin, which if i had more experience with that method, im sure it would have been much smoother, so we muddled through it, and got phpmyadmin installed. Now we have to connected to phpmyadmin. Ok we know mysql is running, and phpmyadmin is not letting us login. DUH, set ROOT password.

mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

(*NOTE* the above is if you are setting mysql root password for the first time)

mysqladmin -u root 'oldpassword' password NEWPASSWORD

(used for changing or updating mysql root password)

OK, so there we have it, LAMP, non-conventional as it seems in the path we took, this is our comfort zone of a build.

Sorry for the elongated post here, and if this provides help to any who may be trying to take this same path, then all the merrier. I can say this, I think there are many who are still trying to run a xampp instance from their desktop, its simply not the same experience as having a webserver. If you are just simply strapped for cash, the suggestion i would give would be to dual boot and install CentOS, then go to work on your home server.

Regards,

DosDawg