Using Alfresco Web Client

You can use Alfresco Web Client as a portlet in Liferay. That is, you use Alfresco content management system inside Liferay. The following figure shows Alfresco Client as a portlet in Liferay.

Liferay provides the ability to allow the publication of Alfresco contents through the portal. You can find Alfresco Client from the Liferay official web site, which provides an Alfresco package prepared for deployment:

1. Download the Alfresco Web Client war file. Rename the file as alfresco.war.
2. Increase the maximum memory. Edit to increase the memory size:

   SET JAVA_OPTS="-Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -
   Dfile.encoding=UTF8 -Duser.timezone=GMT -Djava.security.auth.
   login.config=$CATALINA_HOME/conf/jaas.config"

3. Startup Tomcat. Log in as the administrator.
4. In the Plugin Installer portlet, click on the Upload tab.
5. Click Browse, and locate the alfresco.war file.
6. Click Deploy.
7. You can now add the Alfresco Client to your page.

Using Alfresco Content

Alfresco web services support remote access and bindings to any client environment. Web Services—SOA is recognized as a way forward for integrating disparate systems including Content Management and building new enterprise-wide solutions. Furthermore, Alfresco Web Scripts are ideal for building data access and updating APIs, simple UI components such as portlets, and integration adaptors. Alfresco OpenSearch has been hosted as a series of Web Scripts. Within Liferay SOA framework, we can export Alfresco content in portlets via Web Services or Web Scripts.

Enjoy Web Services

Web services are applications designed to support interoperable interaction over a network. In fact, web services are just Web APIs accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system that hosts the requested services.

Alfresco Web Services is provided by Alfresco Repository. It supports remote access and bindings to any client environment. For example, alfresco community is already using PHP, Ruby and Microsoft .NET. Numerous standards and integration efforts are focused around Web Services—SOA is recognized as a way forward for integrating disparate systems including Content Management and building new enterprise-wide solutions. BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) plays an important role in orchestrating all these services.

Alfresco web services API include the following core Services:

• Authentication
• Repository—query and model manipulation
• Content—content manipulation
• Authoring—collaborative content creation
• Access Control—Users, groups, Roles and Permissions
• Administration—environment, configuration, export and import
• Dictionary—model descriptions
• Content Rules—automate content management behavior
• Classification—apply classifications and categories

The following figure depicts an example for Alfresco Content—web services portlet. You can navigate contents, search contents by OpenSearch, and set up default access account. After selecting the content, the portlet will display the content directly in the Portal.

Employ Web Scripts

A Web Script provides a service on the web, where the service may perform any function. Web Scripts are suited for Content Management functions, as they are backed by the Alfresco Repository. Each Web Script is bound to a HTTP method and custom URL such as http://sesame.cignex.com/cms_services/services?action=navigate. A library of URLs may be built up to provide a complete (RESTful) HTTP API (for example, to download an image: http://sesame.cignex.com/cms_services/services?action=download&uid=01232bda-f934-11dc-aef1-813a1994e4b0).

Web Scripts allow us:

• to build custom URL-identified and HTTP accessible Content Management Web Services
• to turn your Alfresco Repository into a Content Management powered HTTP Server
• to easily access, manage and cross-link your content via a tailored RESTful API

The following figure depicts an example of the Alfresco Content—Web Scripts portlet. You can first navigate the contents dynamically by browse tree. After selecting content from the contents list, the portlet will display the content with its own format intelligently. For example, if content format is HTML, the portlet will display the content by HTML. If content format is PDF, the portlet will allow the User to download the content first, and then use local reader to open the content. Then, you can search the contents by keywords.

Finally, you can configure the Alfresco server connection, such as Server URL, Default Account for connection, and so on.

Use Alfresco as Liferay Direct Repository

Liferay has a wide range of portlets available freely for things such as Blogs, Calendar, Document Library, Image Gallery, Mail, Message Boards, Polls, RSS Feeds, Wiki, and many others. Liferay Portal also ships with Liferay Journal CMS (Content Management System), which provides basic ECMS (Enterprise Content Management Systems) features. If you want something beefier, then it will integrate with Alfresco.

When you integrate Alfresco with Liferay, you may need to consider the following questions:

• Do you want to integrate Alfresco Contents within Liferay articles?
• Do you want to use Alfresco document management as CMS repository of Liferay?
• Do you want to replace CMS in Liferay with Alfresco CMS in Liferay?

Here is a possible solution:

Let’s use alfresco repository for Liferay repository as follows:

1. Add the Journal portlet in the current page.
2. Click the Add Article button.
3. In the editor, click the Insert Image icon next to the Source button and the Insert Anchor icon as shown in the following figure.
4. In the Image Properties windows, click the Browse Server button.
5. In the Resources Browser windows, you can browse folders (that is spaces in alfresco) and select files (such as image files) as shown in the following figure.

How does it work? Here are possible steps abstracted from the real website:

• Prepare web scripts in Alfresco server, such as search contents, update contents, get contents, download contents, and navigate spaces as folders.
• Prepare CMS services for searching contents, updating contents’ metadata, getting contents’ metadata, downloading contents and navigating spaces.
• In the editor, consume the CMS services replacing the Liferay Image Gallery services and Document Library services.

For example, you can get the bundled files and read-me messages from the web site http://liferay.cignex.com/sesame/ and furthermore, you can play with it as a do-it-yourselfer.

Migrating Contents

Suppose that you already have contents stored in Liferay such as Image Gallery and Document Library. Now, you want to transfer these contents stored in Liferay into Alfresco. Let’s do it as follows.

A portlet called Alfresco Importer provides services of content migration from Liferay Content Management repositories to alfresco repositories. Through Liferay services, the portlet gets all CMS contents with all communities; again by web services, the portlet writes all CMS contents into Alfresco repository, where the space names are created automatically by community’s names. The following figure depicts the look and feel of the Alfresco Importer portlet.

You need to fill the following fields in the Alfresco Importer portlet:

1. Alfresco username and password: these fields will be used to connect to Alfresco through web services.
2. Destination path: this is the path of the Alfresco space in which the folders will be created, and the files imported. “Company Home” is the default root space.
3. You need to specify the folders‘ name that will be created for each CMS portlet. Then, three folders (“spaces” in alfresco terminology) will be created in Alfresco repository: one each for Document Library, Journal Articles and Image Gallery.

After you click on the Import button, the portlet will do the following steps:

• For each community in the current company, create a space in the root space (described in the second bullet step above). Each space’s name will be the same as the community’s name.
• Inside each community’s space, create three folders with the names chosen (in third bullet step above).
• Import the files from Document Library and Image Gallery, keeping the same folder structure they have in these portlets. Journal Articles are imported to the same Folder, their content is merged with their Templates and the result is imported to Alfresco as HTML files.

Integrating Liferay with LDAP, SSO And Alfresco

The following diagram shows full integration of Liferay, Alfresco, LDAP and SSO CAS. Here is a generic solution for full integration of SSO CAS and LDAP against Liferay Portal and Alfresco Portlets. Here is the generic solution of SSO CAS plus LDAP against:

• Alfresco Standalone Application—shown as SSO 1.
• Liferay Portal and, furthermore, Alfresco Portlets – shown as SSO 2, SSO 3, and SSO 4“.

To integrate SSO CAS plus LDAP with Liferay Portal and Alfresco Portlets such as Alfresco Client portlet and Alfresco Content portlet, simply follow these steps in sequence:

1. First configure the Liferay Portal authenticating with LDAP.
2. Then configure the SSO CAS server authenticating with LDAP.
3. Finally configure the Alfresco portlets (Alfresco Client and Alfresco Content) authenticating with SSO.

For example, you can first log in to Alfresco standalone application http://liferay.cignex.com:8090/alfesco by a User account. You are asked to input authentication information here. You will see Alfresco web client standalone application. Then, click Liferay portal http://liferay.cignex.com:8092/c/portal/login. You will see that you don’t have to log in to the Liferay portal. You are logged into the Alfresco Web Client portlet automatically. That is, web applications (Alfresco standalone application, Liferay Portal and portlets) share the same access ticket— to defer all authentications to a trusted central server (SSO and LDAP).

The full integration involves two main functionalities: filters in action for Liferay Portal and Alfresco applications, and portlets in action for any portlet in Liferay Portal. The following are some general instructions to implement these two main functionalities: filters in action and portlets in action.

Filters in action involve the following steps:

• Enhanced SSO Filter
• Authenticating SSO CAS Server with LDAP
• Enhanced validating URL in SSO CAS Server
• Authenticating with LDAP
• Automatic login

Portlets in action involve the following steps:

• Loading portlet
• Tracing current User from filter
• Authenticating portlet with LDAP
• Automatic login

Important URLs for Integration with Alfresco:

1)            Enterprise Security and Authentication Configuration

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Enterprise_Security_and_Authentication_Configuration

2)               There is a pre-configured alfresco.war in Liferay’s plug-in repository, which you can deploy in the portal.

https://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lportal/plugins/trunk/

Allowing Comments and Pings

Just to the right of the post title is a Discussion section, with a couple of check boxes. These allow you to override the options controlling comments and pings for this individual post. The Allow Comments and Allow Pings check boxes normally reflect the blog’s Discussion Options settings  for the “Allow people to post comments on the article” and “Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks),” respectively.

Checking or clearing one of these boxes overrides that setting for this post only; it does not affect the default setting for new posts. So, if there is a check in the box for Allow Comments, comments will be enabled for this post. Similarly, a check next to Allow Pings will allow Pingbacks and TrackBacks to be accepted by this post.

Password-Protecting Posts

To the right of the Discussion check boxes is the Post Password box. Typing a word or phrase into this field (you’ll notice that the password is displayed in plain text as you type it) will password-protect this posting. This means that, on the main page of your blog, this post will not, by default, display its contents. Instead the reader is presented with the title of the post (with Protected: prepended) and a password-entry field. The normal comments link is also replaced with the phrase “Enter your password to view comments,” as shown in Figure 15-6.

Figure 15-6: A password-protected post

Assuming you have given the password you entered when you published the post to some other people, they can type in the password and be able to read the post. The post is then displayed normally, although the title still has Protected: prepended to it. Comments are also accessible at that point.

Adding Excerpts

The next advanced feature is the Excerpt box, where you can write your own excerpt to describe your post to people browsing feeds.

When a reader subscribes to one of the XML feeds available from your blog—RSS, Atom, or RDF—one of the pieces of information provided as part of that feed is a description, along with the title, date, and so on. This is usually an excerpt of the post content. By default, WordPress will create that excerpt for you by stripping all the tags from your post and extracting the first 250 or so characters. Often, this will be sufficient for most people’s needs.

Sometimes, however, the opening sentence or two from your post isn’t really a good description of what it is about. It’s kind of like the difference between the blurb on the back of a paperback novel and the opening two sentences. If you want to make sure that people browsing the latest feeds will want to visit your blog and read your posts, you should write the excerpt yourself. Think of it as a targeted summary of the post that may additionally improve your site’s search engine visibility, as discussed at the end of this chapter.

Using Advanced Options

More options are contained in the Advanced section at the bottom of the Write Posts page, as shown in Figure 15-7.

Figure 15-7: Advanced options in Advanced Editing mode

These options work as follows:

• Post Status: Just below the standard editing controls, you will find radio buttons to set the post status. These statuses—Published, Draft, and Private—correspond to the statuses resulting from clicking the Save as Draft, Save as Private, and Publish buttons, as described earlier.
• Send trackbacks to: This field corresponds to the TrackBack URI described earlier.
• Post slug: This strange-sounding field is the part of the permanent URI to your post used in the search engine-friendly URLs you can configure in WordPress. See the “Improving Search Engine Visibility” section later in this chapter for more details.
• Post author: This drop-down list allows you to assign the authorship of a post to another author. If you don’t see this field, that’s because it works only if your own user level is level 7 or greater. If you do have access to it, you can assign posts only to authors of lower levels than yourself. (See the “Assigning User Permissions” section later in this chapter for more details on user levels.)
• Edit timestamp/Edit time: These options allow you to edit the published timestamp of the post. As a general rule, you probably won’t want to modify this. It can, however, be used to post blog entries in the future. To use this control, fill in the date and time fields as you want, and check the Edit timestamp check box. If you are editing a post that has already been published, the box will be checked for you. The date and time will be set to the original date and time the post was published. This is so that when you’re making a minor correction to the post, for example, it retains the original timestamp. If you use the date (or even time) in the permanent link URI of the post, retaining the original timestamp is more important than it might seem at first. If you were to change the date, you would also change the URI. This would make the permanent link somewhat less than permanent.

Using Custom Fields

The last editable section in the Advanced Edit mode is the Custom Fields section. These are fields available to be used by various plug-ins you can add to WordPress. The use of these is always specific to the plug-ins you have installed and enabled. If you need to use any of these, the documentation for your plug-in will tell you.

Setting General Options

I’ll take you through the basic configuration of your blog next. To start, click the Options tab near the top of the page. You can see that you are editing “General Options,” as shown in Figure 14-10. Within the options system, you can always check the top of the page to see where you are. The current subtab will be highlighted, and the title of the page will tell you which options you are editing.

Figure 14-10: General Options page

Here, you can see the blog title you entered when you ran the install script, as well as the blog tag line, which is like the tag line you find under a newspaper masthead. Change the default to something appropriate for your blog. Don’t worry if you can’t think of something witty or impressive just now. You can always change it later.

You generally don’t need to change the WordPress address and Blog address fields unless you are doing something unusual with the location of WordPress’s files. Your e-mail address appears as the one you entered when you installed WordPress. If you need to change it, you can.

The next two options are about membership of your blog. If you want to run your blog as a community site, you might consider enabling these two options. The Anyone can register option causes a link to a registration form to appear on your main page. This allows new users to register themselves. By default, these newly registered users won’t be able to post new stories. You need to promote them first.

The date and time options are self-explanatory. The software usually gets the time right based on your server’s setting. You can use the setting “Times in the weblog should differ by” to set the times for the blog posting to your local time, by putting a positive or negative number in this box. If UTC is showing 9:30 p.m. and it is 1:30 p.m. on your wristwatch, then set this to –8, for eight hours behind. If you don’t like the default date and time display, click the link provided to read the documentation on PHP’s date() function. For example, if you want to display the date as June 17, 2005, set the field to F j, Y.

Finally, the last item on the General Options page allows you to set on what day of the week your calendar should begin.

Configuring Discussion Options

When you click the Discussion tab on the Options page, you will see a set of options related to the various discussions that can take place around your blog, as shown in Figure 14-11. The important settings on this page allow you to prevent comment spam from appearing on your blog. I’ll cover comment spam in the next section and focus on the other discussion settings here.

Figure 14-11: Discussion Options page

E-Mail

The next two settings on the Discussion Options page govern when you receive e-mail from your WordPress blog. You can have WordPress send you an e-mail message whenever anyone posts a comment or sends a TrackBack or Pingback. And you can have WordPress send you an e-mail message whenever a comment is held for moderation. Comment moderation is covered in the next section.

Figure 14-12 shows a sample e-mail message sent when a comment has been left on your blog. In it, you can see the blog name and posting title included in the subject. The message also includes details of the comment author’s name, e-mail, and URI, if supplied, and, of course, the visitor’s comment.

Figure 14-12: Sample notification e-mail

For checking and tracing purposes, the e-mail also includes the IP address of the visitor as reported by the web server, a reverse DNS lookup, and a link to a WHOIS lookup of that IP address. These three items should give you useful information if you are the victim of comment spam or some other comment nastiness. Unfortunately, some of the spammers post remotely from innocent machines or through third-party proxies, or else spoof the IP address, rendering those pieces of information less useful.

For convenience, the e-mail also includes a link to the posting on which the comment was made. This allows you to read the comment in context of the post and other comments. It also includes a direct link to automatically delete the comment. If the e-mail is about a comment that is waiting for moderation, there will also be a link to automatically approve the comment and one to take you to the comment moderation page.

Avoiding Comment Spam

Comment spam refers to comments that are made on your blog by comment spammers for the purpose of promoting their commercial sites. They usually have one of two purposes in mind, sometimes both:

• They want to get links to their sites in as many places as possible in the hope that a lot of people will click the link.
• They want to gain higher placing in search-engine rankings by being linked to from as many places as possible.

The commercial sites the spammers link to are usually online casinos, drug-selling sites, or porn sites. Quite often, the comments link to sites that don’t appear to be commercial sites, but rather seem to be offering useful information about their subject. Don’t be fooled. The idea is that you and search engines won’t penalize these sites because they appear to be innocent. Often, the comments with links to these sites seem innocuous, something like, “This is my first visit to your site. I thought it was great.” The spammers hope that the links to these sites will remain in place and gain various advantages, particularly with search engines. At some point in the future, they will switch on the commercial pages, either as links within the text to the commercial sites or by replacing the page with a commercial one.

WordPress includes several measures to combat and thwart the spammers. These are available through the comment settings on the Discussion Options page (see Figure 14-11).

Setting File Upload Options

The next set of options you will want to tweak are those involving adding images and other media to your blog. Click the Miscellaneous tab under Options to get to these options, as shown in Figure 14-13.

Figure 14-13: Miscellaneous Options page

If you want to be able to add images and other media to your blog posts, you need to enable file uploads. WordPress usually guesses the Destination directory setting correctly. This is the full path to the wp-content folder on your server.

The URI of this directory setting is the web-visible URI the server will expose this folder as. WordPress sometimes gets this wrong. The URI it guesses works, but not all the time, particularly in the administration pages, so you cannot see your images in preview mode. Change this to an absolute path on the server. For example, if your blog URI is http://example.com/myblog, set it to /myblog/wp-content. You can use a folder completely outside the WordPress folder if you like. For example, you may have an existing /images folder you wish to use. Whichever folder you choose, it will need to be writable by the web server.

The next setting on this page allows you to specify a maximum file upload size. You may want to set this to some value appropriate to the files you will be uploading. If you are going to allow other people to post and upload files to your blog, you may want to set this to a lower value.

The Allowed file extensions setting is a space-separated list of file extensions that WordPress will allow to be uploaded. You might want to add mp3 if you are going to add MP3s to your posts, perhaps if you are podcasting.

The last setting in this section is the minimum user privilege level required before a registered user is able to upload files. If you have multiple authors on your blog, you might want to allow only certain authors to upload files. You would raise their user level to this value to allow them to do that.

The Track Links’ Update Times check box refers to the blogroll-style links that WordPress supports. If you check this box and include the file wp-admin/update-links.php in your theme file, WordPress will automatically track the last time the blogs in your links were updated.

Finally, the “Use legacy my-hacks.php file support” setting refers to an old pre-plug-in system that WordPress used to support. As you are installing a new blog, you won’t need to turn on this setting.

Meeting the Requirements

Your system needs to meet some basic requirements to install and run a WordPress blog. The first is hosting. You’ll need an account on a server somewhere. This may be shared hosting or your own server, if you have one. WordPress does work on Windows, especially with the same web server and database setup. But because it’s the most common and, frankly, the simplest to set up, I’m going to concentrate on GNU/Linux-based hosting.

Your hosting server needs to have support for PHP version 4.1 or later and MySQL database server version 3.23.23 or later. I recommend Apache as a web server (version 1.3.23 or later), but any web server capable of supporting PHP should work. If you have support for mod_rewrite in Apache, you’ll be able to use some especially useful features of WordPress. (See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html for more information about mod_rewrite.) You’ll also need to be able to upload files via FTP and change permissions on your files and folders.

I don’t have a recommendation for disk space or bandwidth. A 1,000-post blog with 2,000 comments and no pictures will fit comfortably in 10MB with room to spare. Bandwidth is too variable to call. Blog popularity ranges from 1 visit a week to 10,000 per day and higher.

A huge number of companies offer hosting. Shop around and get the best deal to suit your needs. Always go for more than you think you’ll need, but stay within your budget. You never know—your blog may become very popular. The last thing you want is to be cut off for exceeding your bandwidth, just as you are building your community.

Obtaining WordPress

Next, you need to get a copy of WordPress. That’s pretty easy. Mouse along to http://wordpress.org/download and download the latest .zip file. The latest release is also available as a gzipped tarball. If your desktop is a UNIX or Linux machine, this may be more appropriate for you. The files inside are all the same.

Obtaining Helper Programs

You will need an FTP program, a program to expand zipped files, and a text editor of some kind.

FTP is the term for the transfer of files from a client, in this case your PC, to a server—your hosting server. Actually the acronym stands for File Transfer Protocol, but it is commonly used as a verb, too. FTP software is readily available. In fact, it is likely that your current operating system already includes an FTP program. Unfortunately, it is probably a command-linedriven one. While command-line FTP is straightforward to use, it is much easier to work with a graphical application if you can. If your desktop is Windows, I recommend Filezilla (http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/) or SmartFTP (http://www.smartftp.com) for FTP. Plenty of other FTP programs are available..

You’ll need a program to unarchive the WordPress installation files you download, because they are compressed in an archive. If you download the .zip file, you will need a program capable of expanding, or unzipping, the archive. WinZip (http://www.winzip.com/) is probably the most popular on Windows, but has a shareware license requiring you to purchase it after a trial period. I recommend 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/), which is completely free.

For a text editor, I recommend nothing more elaborate than Notepad for now. Later, you might want to evaluate some of the specialized PHP and CSS editors.

Gathering Information

Before doing anything else, you will need to gather some information and make a fairly simple decision.

From your hosting service you will need the following information:

• Your login and password for FTP (you should have been given those when you signed up for your hosting)
• The name of your database, if one has already been created for you, and your database login details

The decision you need to make is simply where to put your blog. By that, I mean that you must decide if your blog will be the only thing on your web site or whether you will want to also have other pages, such as Drupal or phpBB sections. It comes down to the URL of your blog. Will it be http://example.com/ or will it be http://example.com/blog? I almost always recommend the latter (of course, you may wish to call it journal, diary, news, or something other than blog), because it leaves your options open for future changes.

Extracting the Files

Before you transfer the WordPress files to your server, you’ll need to expand the archive. The file you downloaded from the WordPress site is an archive, or a compressed collection of files. Then you will need to use FTP to transfer the WordPress files you downloaded earlier to your server. These tasks require the FTP program and expansion software I mentioned earlier as requirements.

Extract the WordPress files from the archive into a convenient folder, such as C:\wpwork or C:\My Documents\wpwork. You’ll need this folder to work through the examples in this book. You should have approximately 160 files in various folders within C:\wpwork. You’ll need to copy one of them and edit it before you upload the files.

Editing the Configuration File

Find the wp-config-sample.php file and make a copy of it called wp-config.php, saving it in the same directory. Load that copy into an editor program—a text editor, not a word processor. As I noted earlier, Notepad will work fine for now, if you don’t have a specialized text editor. In this file, you need to change the dummy database connection settings to the real values.

Listing 14-1: MySQL Settings in wp-config.php

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');     // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'username');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');     // 99% chance you won't need
to change this value

Fill in the details for the database name, database user, and password from the information you gathered earlier. As the comment says, it is very unlikely you will need to change the host setting. I have found only one hosting service that required the host setting to be changed. If you do need to change that setting, your hosting provider will have supplied that information along with your other details.

Listing 14-2: MySQL Settings Populated in wp-config.php

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'wp_example');     // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'wp_db_user');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'secret'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');     // 99% chance you won't need
to change this value

If your installation of WordPress is going to share a database with another WordPress installation—that is, if you plan to keep the data tables for multiple WordPress installations in the same database—you’ll also need to change the prefix setting just below the database connection setting, which looks like this:

$table_prefix = 'wp_';   // example: 'wp_' or 'b2' or 'mylogin_'

to this:

$table_prefix = 'example_';   // example: 'wp_' or 'b2' or 'mylogin_'

Now save the changes made in wp-config.php file.

Next, create a brand-new file called dothtaccess.txt in the same folder as wp-config.php. It should be an empty file, but if you’re using Notepad, it won’t let you create an empty file! Simply press Enter a couple of times to get around this restriction. You can create the file in Windows Explorer if you wish. Simply right-click, choose New ➤ Text Document, and name it dothtaccess.txt.

Setting File Permissions

Before you put away the FTP program, you need to check your permissions on certain files and directories. By default, files you upload to your server and directories you create on it are owned by you, or rather your account on the server. This is correct and as you might expect. However, the web server, Apache, usually runs as a different user, often apache, httpd, or nobody. This means that software running under Apache—in this case, WordPress—doesn’t normally have permissions to modify or delete files, nor to create new ones. To fix this, you need to change the permissions of some of the WordPress files. You will most likely need to give full access to those files. You will also need to give write access to a couple of folders, so that WordPress can create new files.

Depending on your FTP software, you will either need to set the file permissions to a numeric value such as 666 or 777, or check the R (read), W (write), or X (eXecute) permissions for U (user or owner), G (group), and O (other). The numeric value 666 represents read and write permissions for user, group, and other. The 777 value represents read, write, and execute permissions for user, group, and other.

Table 14-1 shows which files and folders need their permissions set and what type of permissions should be applied. Note that a folder name with an asterisk following it signifies that all the files in that folder need their permissions adjusted.

Table 14-1: File and Folder Permissions
Open table as spreadsheet

File/Folder	Mode
.htaccess	666
wp-content/themes/classic/*	666
wp-content/themes/default/*	666
wp-content/themes/default/images*	666
wp-content	777
wp-content/plugins	777
wp-content/themes	777
wp-content/themes/default	777
wp-content/themes/default/images	777
wp-content/themes/classic	777

These changes will allow you to edit the themes that come with WordPress and to install new themes and plug-ins later. Next, you’ll finish installing WordPress.

Running the Install Script

You are now ready to install WordPress on your server. You have created a database, given permissions to your database user, uploaded the WordPress files, created a couple of new files, and set permissions appropriately. Although reading through these instructions, it seems like a lot of work, if you are already familiar with these tasks, this whole process really does take only five minutes! Have heart, you are nearly there.

Go to your web browser and type the following address into the address bar (assuming you installed in the blog directory):

http://yourdomain/blog/wp-admin/install.php

This will load the WordPress install script, as shown in Figure 14-5. Click First Step, and you will be prompted for the title of your weblog and an e-mail address.

Figure 14-5: The first screen of the WordPress install script

As shown in Figure 14-6, type in a suitable name—Wendy’s Weblog, Tuxedo News, or whatever you want to call it. Don’t worry—you can change the title later. Make sure the e-mail address you enter is valid. Your administrator (admin) password will be sent to it. Click the Continue to Second Step button to move to the next step.

Figure 14-6: Install step 1

Next, you will see a progress screen as the install script creates your database tables for you. In practice, it is so fast that all you will see is the “Finished!” message. You will see instructions for logging in to your new blog. Make a careful note of the password. For security reasons, it is a randomly generated one.

Tip

When I’m setting up a new WordPress blog, I select the password with my mouse and copy it to the clipboard (by pressing Ctrl+C). Then I can simply paste it into the login form.

Logging In

Now, click the link to wp-login.php. You will see the standard WordPress login screen. Enter the username of admin and the password from the previous page, as shown in Figure 14-7. Then click the Login button.

Figure 14-7: The WordPress login screen

Changing the Admin Password

The first thing to do with your newly installed blog is to change the admin password to something you will remember. Click the Users tab across the top of the page. You’ll see a form with space to enter a lot of personal details about yourself, as shown in Figure 14-9. Near the bottom are the fields to enter a new password. You need to enter the password twice. This is to check that you didn’t mistype it.

Figure 14-9: Editing your user profile

You can go ahead and enter your other details while you are on the page. By default, none of these details other than your nickname and web address are ever visible on your blog. When you have finished entering all your details click Update Profile to save your changes.

Now you’re ready to configure WordPress.