Getting Started - Web Services

In order to get started with bBlog, you'll need Apache installed with PHP (PHP version 4.1 or above), a MySQL database server (MySQL version 3.23 or above), the "Smarty" templates package (no reason to worry as it is available as a combined download with bBlog) and a copy of the latest release (currently bBlog version 0.7.4) of the package; you can download this release from http://www.bblog.com/download.php.

Since the database should already exist before we install the application, we will need to create one - here, we recommend that you create a separate database (say "bBlog"), along with a special MySQL user having the appropriate permissions on this new database.

So, start up a MySQL prompt on your console and execute the following commands.

mysql> CREATE DATABASE `bBlog`;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

This should create a database called "bBlog" - verify that the database has been created using the following command at the MySQL prompt.

mysql> SHOW DATABASES LIKE 'bBlog';
+------------------+
| Database (bBlog) |
+------------------+
| bBlog            |
+------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

After confirming that the "bBlog" database has been created, we proceed to create a MySQL user with appropriate permissions. Just a  little note before you execute the next command - be sure to change the password in the following SQL statement for obvious security reasons.

mysql> GRANT SELECT ,  INSERT ,  UPDATE , DELETE , CREATE , DROP , INDEX , ALTER ON `bBlog`.* TO  "bbloguser"@"localhost" IDENTIFIED BY "password_comes_here";
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)

This should create a MySQL user with the username "bbloguser" with the appropriate permissions to manage our new "bBlog" database.

Next, we have to identify the URL required to access our blog - this is critical since it dictates where we install bBlog. If you want our opinion, we recommend that you use an URL that reads like this: http://www.mysite.com/theblog/.

There are other options available. For further details, please refer the installation guide at the following URL: http://www.bblog.com/wiki/index.php/Installation.

Next, we uncompress the source archive under the root folder of the Apache Web server.

$ cd /www/htdocs/

$ tar -xzvf /tmp/bBlog-0.7.4.tar.gz

This should create a directory named "blog" with the all required files.  Here is a quick view of some the files and folders that should be created on our Web server.

blog
|
| --- README_UPGRADE.txt
| --- archives.php
+ --- bblog
| ------ BUGS.txt
| ------ INSTALL.txt
| ------ LICENCE.txt
| ------ README-URLS.txt
| ------ ...
| ------ index.php
| ------ install.php
| ------ ...
| --- htaccess-cleanurls
| --- index.php
| --- item
| --- rss.php
\ --- section

You should immediately rename this "blog" folder to "theblog" so that the blog can be accessed using the URL - http://www.mysite.com/theblog/ - as discussed earlier. The following command should do what you need.

$ mv blog theblog

You'll need to take one final step before we move to the browser-based installation screen - file permissions. As is common with most web-based applications, certain files and folders should be writable by the Web server. In this case, the following commands should be sufficient.

A little warning before executing these commands - they give blanket permission for the specified files to all users on your server. So, if you intend to host bBlog on a shared server, it would be wise to have a quiet chat with the server administrator on the best manner to enforce the required file permissions.

$ cd theblog/bblog/

$ chmod 777 cache/ cache/favorites.xml compiled_templates config.php

That’s about it as far as pre-installation requirements of bBlog are concerned. In the next section, we shall guide you through its browser-based installation wizard - one feature which we feel makes it very user-friendly to install.