Dotclear is an open-source web publishing software created in 2002 by Olivier Meunier. A one man's project at first, Dotclear soon gathered a team comprising different personalities with various backgrounds.

Follow these instructions to install Dotclear on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty).

Warning: This tutorial is not adapted to a Linux-based personal hosting solution for one or several Dotclear blogs, but is only intended for local tests before or in conjunction with an online version at a third-party hosting provider. Also, to make it simpler, the tutorial only covers installations with MySQL. Don't worry, though - if your hosting providers offers PostgreSQL, you will be able to import the data you created locally.

Installation

Note: All Linux distributions typically provide the packages required to install a fully functional Apache server, with all sorts of modules and configuration options 1).

The easiest way is to download a server that is "ready to use", designed for testing: XAMPP. This one does not provide the security of a "production" server, but you get everything you need in one single package !

In fact, XAMPP will install: an Apache web server, a MySQL database server, the languages PHP 4 and 5 (version 5, required for Dotclear 2, is actived by default), phpMyAdmin, and phpSQLiteAdmin, as well as all the libraries necessary to make them run. Al of this is included in a small 50 MB package.

Once you have downloaded it, extract it into your /opt directory as indicated on the website, with a simple

sudo tar -xzf xampp-linux-1.5.5a.tar.gz -C /opt

You can then start the server:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

and take two minutes to configure the passwords (basic security):

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp security

Now check the following address in your favourite browser: http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/

If a pretty page is displayed, then everything's alright. Otherwise, you have missed something in the previous steps

But you'll still find people who say that Linux is far too complicated! :-D

Prepare the server to "host" Dotclear

MySQL : activating InnoDB

Important

Dotclear 2 MySQL to use InnoDB to run properly: that's why you need to activate it, because it's disabled by default in XAMPP.

Nothing tricky here: open the configuration file in your favorite text editor (with administrator permissions)

sudo vim /opt/lampp/etc/my.cnf

Look for the following lines:

# Comment the following line to unskip and use InnoDB skip-innodb

and comment the line as you're recommended, which should give you

# Comment the following line to unskip and use InnoDB #skip-innodb

Don't forget to save your changes then restart the server:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp restart

MySQL: creating the database

Log into phpMyAdmin as root (providing the password you have previously defined for MySQL with lampp security, or leaving the password field empty if you're not afraid and haven't configured the security): http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

In the left column of the main area, you will see the title "create a database". Enter the name of the new base (for example dotclear) then choose the collation type utf8_unicode_ci. You can then press the "create" button. We're over with phpMyAdmin Placing Dotclear files

Download the last version of Dotclear 2 then extract it into the htdocs directory of the XAMPP installation:

sudo tar -xzf dotclear-2.1.5.tar.gz -C /opt/lampp/htdocs/

Then authorise anyone to read, write and execute files (this is a local installation, there isn't much danger around):

sudo chmod -R 777 /opt/lampp/htdocs/dotclear/

We're now ready to start the wizard.

Initial configuration of Dotclear 2

Go back to your browser: http://localhost/dotclear/admin/install/wizard.php

Choose MySQL as "Type of database", enter localhost as "name of the database host", dotclear as your "database name", root as "username for the database", enter the password you defined for MySQL into the "password for the database" field, then leave the prefix and the location of the temporary directory unchanged.

Normally, if you click on "Save", you are directed to the next page where you only have to fill your email, last name and first name.

With XAMPP, there are no mail server activated, so the following page displays a default login name and the associated password, with a link for you to log in.

From the official documentation of dotclear