pre-installation permission issues

[maxthayer]

I am attempting an install of the CMS... I have copied the un-rar'ed files up to my world viewable web dir /www the current location of all the files are as such.
/www/aliroLoader.php
/www/aliro/[aliro unpacked with chmod u=rwx,g=rx,o=rx]

if i go to /www/aliro/admistrator/index.php I get the PHP message:

Notice: Cache failed on disk write, class smartAdminClassMapper, path /www/aliro/cache/singleton/smartAdminClassMapper in /www/aliro/bootstrap/objectcache.php on line 131

any help appreciated greatly.

[counterpoint]

Not sure where unrar comes in. Did you load the complete Aliro package using the loader?

Do you happen to know who is the owner of the installed files? And what user Apache runs PHP scripts as?

[maxthayer]

All I meant by unrar was unpacked...

I unpack the files to a local space, and rsync the files to my web server... during rsync files are chmod to the previously stated permissions. All files are owned by a user account, group is run by wheel

[counterpoint]

OK, you should not unpack the Aliro package, it is intended to be uploaded in its entirety by the Aliro uploader. The uploader will deal with unpacking it and placing the files on the server.

The problem you have is most likely that all the files and directories are owned by the user, but the web server and the PHP scripts are running as a different user, which will not have write access to the directories. Hence things like cache will not work.

[maxthayer]

Yah, so once all dir's were chgrp'd to apache's user and 775'd the dirs it installed properly.

Is there a way to move non-world viewable files outside of the world viewable realm instead of relying on .htaccess?

Lastly, the quick start got Aliro installed... is there a tutorial published on getting a basic site up and running? ie. menu's configured, login/registration up, and simple content?

Aliro is the first CMS I have installed from scratch...and I'm finding the learning curve on post installation setup a bit taxing. Things I look forward to using and appreciate are the php5 OO programming techniques and the implementation of a fairly robust looking RBAC user security system.

But if I can't get the main page to load a simple "hello world"....I don't know.

[counterpoint]

Yes, that is the reason for using the loader, so that the files are given the same ownership as the user running the PHP scripts. In fact, I'd always recommend anyone running any advanced PHP (such as a CMS) to first make sure that their hosting is using suexec to run PHP scripts as the site owner. That obviates a lot of problems.

It is possible to move much of the PHP outside the document root by setting symbols in the ../bootstrap/definitions.php file but it has not yet been wrapped up in the installation process to make it easy.

There is no particular need to do it either. Apart from index.php which is intended to be run, all the PHP files contain nothing but classes (maybe with the addition of symbol definitions) and running those files directly has no effect. Although just to give added security, I do put a restriction in the Apache configuration to prevent anything other than index*.php from being run - which could be done (less efficiently) in .htaccess if you do not have access to the Apache configuration.

You can make a start by going to the admin side, choosing Applications - Simple Text and creating a page of text. Make sure it is published. Then create a type of menu - perhaps giving it a symbol of "mainmenu" and a title of "Main Menu". Edit that menu and add to it an item that points to the text item recently created, and with a title of "Home". Go to Display Boxes - User Boxes - and look at the Aliro Main Menu item details, and make it active. That's the bare bones of starting a site, assuming you have installed Aliro with the selected addons.

There is more work for the project to do in this area. It will include the creation of sample data so that you can install a site that has something to see from the beginning. Although there is merit in being able to remove everything from the framework and starting from scratch.

[maxthayer]

Thank you for some insight into getting some quick content up on my demo of Aliro. I agree entirely with you in having a clean install, no demo data or content installed initially.

At current, how many folks do you have working consistently on the Aliro project? And do you have a dedicated team working on documentation and instruction? If the need is there and I am confident in my own abilities to set up and maintain an Aliro site I'd consider assisting in some manner.

I am a large proponent of dumping PHP4/MySQL4 programming paradigms seeing as PHP6 is coming down the pike and MySQL5.1 has been stable now for more than 2 years and MySQL6 is on our heels. My own interests lie in relational database design and the integration of true RDB concepts into modern web applications.

Thank you again.

[counterpoint]

Aliro is fully committed to being open source, and is currently entirely a volunteer project. It is difficult to be precise about who is active and to what extent in that situation, but there are four people who are heavily committed to Aliro. Several others are actively developing, and quite a few more have expressed interest but not contributed greatly. New contributors who will be active in the project are very welcome.

I agree absolutely (and took this as a policy decision three years ago when work started on Aliro) that there is no point in developing for anything but PHP5 (and migrating to 6 when it becomes viable and is available with sufficient hosts). Aliro should currently work correctly with PHP 5.3.x.

On the whole, the project is happy with requiring MySQL 5, although there is some uncertainty about the extent to which we should take advantage of features like stored procedures, which tend to make migration to other databases harder.

There are plenty of interesting questions about how relational databases should be used in a CMS! Ideas on this area are welcome, and help with documentation would also be much appreciated!

[maxthayer]

In the next few weeks I intend to evaluate my needs and how the Aliro CMS framework will be able to assist me in the project I am currently working on.

The initial installation, template setup, and site styling will be the first hurdles to tackle I think. Then I'll move into analyzing and learning the plug-in/component/application development.

I am interested in implementing the RBAC model you developed for Aliro and centering my application development on the Aliro framework. I am currently building a LIMS for a fairly large research institute. There is a very specific scientific community which uses our lab services and we have need for a robust and secure web application and interface to our databases. I have looked at many web security models, I have even considered building my own, but in the end... why reinvent the wheel.

Any thoughts, comments or tips regarding the scalability of Aliro and its security model would also be greatly appreciated... I guess I'll just keeping asking questions as long as you are willing to respond...

Thank you,
Max

[counterpoint]

The use of templates/themes in Aliro is aimed at both power and ease of development. So critical areas within the framework make calls to the site template in order to give it maximum control over how HTML is created for site pages. But the model is quite simple, and user side templates should normally be subclassed from aliroUserTemplateBase, so as to have useful properties and methods immediately available. (There is aliroAdminTemplateBase for the admin side - both are part of a small framework that has a common parent).

You can find code in the SVN repository (see http://aliro.org for links). A simple user side template is the one presently used at http://aliro.org and is called ut_isometric. A more complex one that is intended to be reskinned for styling specific applications but should not need change for extra screen positions is ut_gbtheme. There is documentation for ut_gbtheme at http://docs.aliro.org/GbTheme. The structure of the repository is currently being modified a bit, but browsing around should find things.

It's hard to say too much about scalability. The Remository site is currently the busiest Aliro based site for which I have details. It handles around 1000 unique visitors per day without the slightest difficulty using a share of a VPS. The stats suggest to me that it could grow to around five times that without stressing the hosting. The design is intended to be capable of going much further, ultimately to multiple servers, but as yet I have no means of verifying how it would work! Certainly Aliro is quite efficient, and much faster than some other CMS.

I'd also hope that the RBAC scheme would scale well, although again there isn't presently any opportunity to verify this. There are a few reasons for this hope. The database design is extremely simple, yet so far as I can see quite general. It is designed specifically for the kind of RBAC questions that arise in a web site. And much of the complexity of the code is to do with holding RBAC data in cache. Data for users who have logged in is kept as session data, since a cache for all users would be cumbersome. However, visitors (not logged in) are indistinguishable from one another, and RBAC data for them is held in a single cache accessed by all requests.

Subject to the normal limitations of a volunteer based open source project, the team is keen to support applications of Aliro, including any issues of scalabililty.