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Features / Usability

Features / Usability


Direct Me to Proper Forum Please

posts: 17 United States

I'm not a programmer. I access my site via cpanel. I have access to Fantastico.
Yesterday I attempted to install Tikiwiki. If it does what it says it does, it is THE ANSWER I have been looking for!

Now, I've seen some not so great references to Fantastico here, and Fantastico offers no support, so I have no idea where to go for help.

The very first screen I was presented with asked me to name the directory to install tiki into. "If you don't know, leave it blank," so I left it blank. That install was impossible until I deleted the "public" folder. Well, I don't think I'm supposed to do that, but if it's okay to do that, what if it has an "images" folder in it with graphic files that I'm accessing remotely? Not knowing what to do, I aborted and didn't try again until.... I came back here, spent a couple of hours prowling around, reading, thinking, then got my nerve up again and tried again. I put the word "wiki" in the blank and by all accounts, tikiwiki was installed (1.8.5). But, alas, I immediately got an error message about not being able to access MySQL:

Warning: mysql_connect(): Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client in /home/goinpost/public_html/tiki/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 340

Opps! Having no clue what to do, I removed the instalation. Considered coming here and attempting to download and install 1.9, but I probably can't handle that. I've read "1.8 is buggy" but on the download page it says 1.8.5 - stable; 1.9 - testing. What to do? Which to try?

I've read that PHP memory needs to be increased. Can "ordinary people" do that?
Is TikiWiki only for large systems, like universities with superservers?
I have plenty of space to install, but how much does an "average" personally-operated site generally need to function well?
I looked yesterday for some functioning "sample" sites, but of the ones I chose from the long list, many had been installed but obviously were not being used, and others belonged to huge institutions with IT staffs. I did notice that several sites had used "wiki" as a subdomain name. Is that the way to do it? Do I create the subdomain first, then install in there?

Could someone direct me to a "small community" functioning tikiwiki website? My website is for teachers to share lesson plans and ideas. I am not connected with a school system.

Is there help somewhere for me?
Thanks,
kt

posts: 2881 United Kingdom

> Warning: mysql_connect(): Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client in /home/goinpost/public_html/tiki/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 340

Sounds like you have a MySQl 4.1 server, which is only supported at the moment by the development 1.9 releases downloaded from http://de.tikiwiki.org

> Opps! Having no clue what to do, I removed the instalation. Considered coming here and attempting to download and install 1.9, but I probably can't handle that. I've read "1.8 is buggy" but on the download page it says 1.8.5 - stable; 1.9 - testing. What to do? Which to try?

1.9 definately

> I've read that PHP memory needs to be increased. Can "ordinary people" do that?

Nope. Which is why we created TikiFriendlyHosts page.

> Is TikiWiki only for large systems, like universities with superservers?

Nope. Anyone. Personal sites, Communities, anything.

> I have plenty of space to install, but how much does an "average" personally-operated site generally need to function well?

Tiki is about 20Mb of SourceCode not including the database.


> I looked yesterday for some functioning "sample" sites, but of the ones I chose from the long list, many had been installed but obviously were not being used, and others belonged to huge institutions with IT staffs. I did notice that several sites had used "wiki" as a subdomain name. Is that the way to do it? Do I create the subdomain first, then install in there?

Nope,you can do it anyway you like:

My own sites:

and many more shown on Damian page.

> Could someone direct me to a "small community" functioning tikiwiki website? My website is for teachers to share lesson plans and ideas. I am not connected with a school system.


> Is there help somewhere for me?

You found the place to ask already!


Damian Parker
http://free.tiki.at.tikihost.net


posts: 17 United States

Damian,

A quick THANKS for the prompt reply before I work my way through your answers and explore the links.

-kt


posts: 17 United States

Thanks. Links helped. The teacher site is not active; I'm moving ahead with trepidation. So many that I visited seem to have "begun" but are not actively maintaining the site. There must be a reason.... is it just too demanding, too powerful, too confusing... we shall see....

I've downloaded. Have printed out installation guide for 1.8.3 by Mykk.
Does it apply to 1.9 as well? So many things have been added; has installation procedure changed?

Have downloaded an FTP program. (Have just configured a new-to-me, hand-me-down PC after previous one was fried by trojan and went into the dumpster, literally, and am having to gather together resources anew.)

Am reading install directions, but probably need to sleep on it before I attempt uploading. So there's time for the answer to "Are the directions the same for 1.9?"

Thanks again. Is your primary site (damosoft.co.uk) tikiwiki? On the Mac, I got an error message at the top of the page at your Corner of World and graphics overlapped the left menu area; page not misbehaving on PC, but error message does appear at top of page. Is TikiWiki known not to like the Macintosh platform? (parenthetical question)...

bye,
kt

posts: 957

kt, Welcome.

It's not so difficult for non-programers to get into tiki. Or to have it up & running on your local server, or a remote server if you have time and patience to read "install" files, InstallTiki help files, etc.

And if the server you are trying to install it to doesn't fit your needs, you have time to learn, want to do the installation and tunning yourself, and the content of your site can be copylefted, the I suggest to read InstallTikiGForge and setup an account and tiki at http://ourproject.org (free, fast server for copyleft'ed content, and very suportive admins there)

Take your time, and ask step by step about the difficulties that may arise (whereever you keep going with your installation: fantastico, Damian server's, other payed or free servers, etc. ).

About using tiki for educational purposes, Damian forgot to point to http://edu.tikiwiki.org, the part of the Tiki educational concerned and involved in the educational uses of Tiki.

I wonder which tiki sites you browsed that were kind-of-discontinued. (?)

You may find some sites which are alive at: (at least, the ones I know because I'm a user there)


Btw, I hope you drop a line at http://edu.tikiwiki.org about the use you are doing of tiki (or planning to do! :-)

Cheers,
Xavi

posts: 17 United States

Xavi,

Thank you for the welcome. I'd PM you this, but I can't figure out how! So, here goes:

I've followed your link to the edu tiki site, and will register there after I get the software installed and some basic configuration done. Basically, here's what I'm doing: I've been "retired" from the classroom for about 14 years, but have found that I'm most comfortable in an educational type of environment (i.e., "let's share") than the cut-throat, keep-it-a-secret "internet marketing" environment, althought I'm making a stab at that as well. After we moved here, a series of "family" moved "home" at different times for different reasons, and the bottom line was that I had to make space, and the quickest way to do that was to part with the 25+ years of collected educational materials, books, records, films, filmstrips, files of lesson plans, realia, etc., and the 5-year collection of graphic arts materials like clip art books and other things left over from our short time as print shop owners. I gave it all away, which in itself was much more of a chore than it should have been! Thousands of dollars of really good stuff, out the door. But, children and grandchildren come first. So, when I needed to "get back to work," the resource left to me was my husband's large stamp collection. Now, he's a real collector and my interest in stamps is not the same as his, but what he has is a gillion "potential lessons" easily available to me. I began scanning and developing lessons around stamps. I built a website, years ago, hosted in shared space at the host my son recommended. I loved doing it, but it was not paying for itself as it eventually needed to do. Also, adding the components that I orginally wanted, like a "community" where other teachers could share their ideas and lesson plans, etc., never happened because of the necessity to find ways to do that back in the days before "content management systems" and integrated scripts.

A couple of months ago, I just took the site down. I was working on other projects. But now, it's time to put it back up. I have it hosted on my "own" remote server (it's very easy to become a "reseller," even for folks who don't know a damn thing and ought not to be doing that, but that's what I'm doing. I've created my own packages. I can give my site as much room as it needs and add features, but I can't do all the technical stuff a "webmaster" ought to be able to do, like change php memory settings. There's nothing on the site right now. It all lives on my iMac hard drive, waiting to be reconfigured and re-uploaded to its new home. I believe my host is "wiki-friendly" because it offers Fantastico and Fantastico offers to install Wiki. I'll find out pretty soon if that is not the case. I believe my early problems were in that the MySQL on the site is higher than 1.8.5 wanted.

So, I will work my way through the installation and see how it goes. I can call my son for some things, and I will check the forums and docs for answers and help; I hate being such a bother, because I am embarrassed that I, with no IT training whatsoever, am attempting to do something that I probably shouldn't attempt, but I cannot afford to hire it done for me. I'm hoping I don't need to move hosts, because the point in moving the site to its current host was to organize all my websites in one place, which didn't occur, but now at least they are less scattered around; they live presently in only four different places!

Side note: I used to teach Advanced Placement Spanish, and have studied in Spain and escorted student groups to Spain and Mexico. I miss it terribly! Even though I now live in a city with a high Hispanic population, I have no ties to that community. When I first came here, I tried to locate groups or find classes that would allow me to keep my skills sharp, was was unable to do so. I've parted with all my resources and references, haven't spoken more than a few words in Spanish in years, so feel like "it's all gone." One of the original purposes of the website was to have been to allow me to refresh ties to education and the Hispanic world. I'm afraid too much time has passed.... Alas, I am old and growing older....

But you may know this:
Let's assume that I am successful in getting the site built and in getting traffic to it. Does the software allow for the diacritical marks some languages use? Can you, for example, type Spanish as it should be typed, with accents and tildes and inverted interrogation marks? Do they show up okay? How am I going to deal with that? (That's a question for on down the road....)

This is too long.
Thanks for your help.

On other topics: Last night after posting and before crashing, I poked around in MyTiki and elsewhere on this site. I see blogs. In MyTiki, I can say whether or not I want "my blog" to display. Do I have a blog here? I clicked on the link in the left menu on "Blogs" and found the page with seven or so blogs, but I don't see how to create a blog. Is that because admin has disabled that feature because that is not the purpose of this website? Or am I missing the "how to" somewhere?

How do members PM other members?

Thanks again,
Karen


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