We have now prepared the system and downloaded the required software but we have not yet used the software. We have to do the last step in order to start creating our magazine site.
Let's open a browser and enter the URL http://packtmediaproject. The setup wizard, provided by eZ Publish will start to configure our new site. Following the setup wizard is quite easy and we'll take a look at all of the pages that we have to visit before using the CMS.
The first page we will see is the welcome page for eZ Publish. Here we can see the welcome message for the installation, and we can click on Next to proceed to the actual installation.
If you forget some aspect of configuration or your system needs some more fixes, the system check page lists all the detected issues. Follow the instructions, one-by-one, to fix the problems. Every time you click on the Next button, the wizard will run the System Check again, and if no more issues are found you can continue. Sometimes it is necessary to ignore a configuration; in this case you need to select the Ignore this test checkbox as seen in the next screenshot:
The Finetune button is used for tuning the whole system to work best with the CMS. This procedure is optional and it should only be used if you have a highly-customized PHP configuration.
After the system has been configured, we need to set up our outgoing email settings. We assume you shall want to use the sendmail SMTP server, which is usually installed on all main Linux distributions.
If your server is configured to not use sendmail (or some compatible MTAs such as Postfix or Qmail) you'll have to use SMTP configuration. In this case, you have to specify the SMTP server name (or its IP address) and the user and password (if needed) to send outgoing emails.
After we finish configuring all of the email stuff, we have to move on to the database side.
In this step we can choose our database engine. eZ Publish supports MySQL, MySQLi and PostgreSQL. In the list are present only the engines configured with our PHP installation.
If you have configured only MySQL as the PHP database, this page will not be shown.
If the PHP is configured to use mysqli extensions, then the setup wizard will suggest that you use this. This choice is recommended, as it guarantees good performance.
After we have chosen our DBMS, we need to provide the necessary information for the system to connect to the database.
To set up our site we have to use localhost as the server name, packname as username, and packtpwd (or an alternative password, if you prefer) for the password.
When the Next button is clicked, the wizard will try to connect to the database. If it fails, then the database initialization page will be shown again.
The language support page allows you to choose the primary language for the eZ Publish installation.
We can also choose other additional languages (in our example we have chosen Italian, French, and English) that will be used to translate content.
The system allows us to reconfigure and add languages at any time, so if you add more languages you can change these settings after the complete installation. It is very important to note that choosing a primary language will also set up the localization of the CMF. So, for example, the type of default date format will change from US format to an Italian one.
As we said before, eZ Publish has some site packages bundled by default. In this section of the wizard, we can select the main package that we will use to develop our site.
All of the packages can be installed and used together, but we don't suggest that you do this. Instead, focus on a single package, and if really necessary extend this through the use of components and extensions.
For our Magazine site we will use the eZ Webin extension, which is bundled in the Website Interface packages.
Note
It is important to allow the server to download content from the Internet. This will be necessary should you want to download all of the packages needed by the eZ Webin extension. If your server is behind a firewall then you will have to create a file called site.ini.append.php in the setting/override directory, and add the following lines to it:
[ProxySettings] ProxyServer=proxy.domain.com:8080 User=proxyUser Password=proxyPassword
Replace proxy.domain.com:8080 with the actual proxy address, and restart the Setup Wizard.
When we select a non-English default language, it is possible that the site package that we install will have no support. In this case, the setup wizard allows three kinds of actions:
1. Map the package language to one of our choices, so that the missing text will be replaced with the default one.
2. Create a new language.
3. Don't create the content for the language.
In our case, we decide to map all of the existing English (UK) content to English (American). Then (if needed) we can update this, according to our needs, later on.
In this step, we can select the access method we want to use in eZ Publish. This is a very important step and the usage of the CMS strictly inherits from this choice.
The system allows three possible choices:
URL (recommended): This is the default, and recommended, value. It doesn't require any particular configuration. It simply uses an HTTP request to the main
index.phpfile to facilitate site access.Port: The Port configuration is used to map a site to a particular port on our server, for example
http://packmediaproject:81/. To use this parameter, it is necessary to change the Apache configuration and handle all of the possible conflicts with proxies and the firewall.Hostname: This last option is used, for example, to map the site to a unique hostname (for example, a subdomain on the backend). As with the Port option, it a web server and a DNS configuration is necessary.
On this page, the wizard will show all of the set-up information. Moreover it shows the databases installed on our system.
Now, we have to select the packmediaproject database, which we have previously created. Do this by selecting it from the drop-down box and clicking on the Refresh button.
If the database is not empty, the wizard will ask what you want to do:
This is the last actual configuration step. Here, we will add base security to our system to prevent it from being used by unknown users.
To do this, we only need to fill the form with the data that will be used by the administrator. It's very important to specify a real email address so that it is possible to change the password if forgotten.
