griffman
01-21-2002, 12:32 PM
I thought some of you might enjoy reading about how the forums came to be, as it's definitely an OS X experience.
I've been wanting to launch a forum site for quite a while, but just never quite got around to looking into it more fully. When I finally did, I looked at a number of forum packages, both free and paid for. After some pretty intensive research, I selected vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com). At $160, this isn't necessarily cheap, but it's an astounding package. If you're considering forum software, I can highly recommend this package. It's nearly infinitely customizable, and nearly everything can be done through template editing, although you'll still want some relatively solid HTML knowledge to get the most out of it.
After picking the software, I got a copy running on my local OS X box via mySQL and PHP and the bundled Apache web server. I then uploaded this to the new ISP and started working on the site there ... but I forgot about my trip home for the holidays! Several weeks go by, and I realize that I need the site local on the iBook (which has never seen mySQL or PHP; I run those on my desktop). Of course, I realized this at 10:30pm on the evening prior to our departure!
Step one - enable PHP. Using a tip on the macosxhints site, this took about two minutes.
Step two - Install mySQL. Using Marc Liyanage's package installer (linked from macosxhints), this took about five minutes.
Step three - Get the site. I logged on to the ISP, and "tarred" (compressed) the entire site structure, then launched Transmit and dragged the tar file to my desktop. From there, open the terminal, move the tar file to the WebServer folder, and uncompress it. So now I had the site with all the modified files. This took maybe five minutes.
Step four - Get the database. On the ISP's server, I had installed phpmyadmin (http://www.phpwizard.net), an amazing web-based mySQL manager. Within phpmyadmin, I chose "dump data and structure", which created a text file of the entire database. I downloaded this with Transmit. This took less than two minutes.
Step five - Make a new local database. In the Terminal, I launched mysql and did a "create database vbulletin". This took a minute.
Step six - Import the data. From the command line, a simple "mysql vbulletin < dumpfile.txt" imported the structure and data into the new database. This took a minute.
The entire process, from start to finish, took maybe 20 minutes. The next day, I was happily working on the site at 30,000 feet jetting home to Denver! I worked on the site on the iBook for a week or so, returned home, and then moved the site to both my G4 desktop and back to the server, using basically the reverse of this process.
For the last two weeks, site development has occurred on my desktop G4 but "live" on the server, since nobody was aware it was there yet :-). Most times, I was running OmniWeb (for testing as the "unregistered" user), Mozilla with about 10 tabs open (customizing, admin testing, other site references), Transmit (for FTP to the server), TextEdit (for quick HTML edits), GoLive (for more complex HTML edits), Terminal (host connections via SSH), PhotoShop Elements (all the graphics were developed or modified in Elements), and my usual collection of "other" stuff like Office, iTunes, Mail, DragThing, GroupWise, and iPhoto.
During this entire time, including the work on the iBook, I have not had one single crash, and I was easily able to work in other apps while things like a 6,000 record database import took place in the background.
The ability to work on a number of completely different things, from a UNIX command line host to a full-blown graphics editor, at the same time with the same GUI over all of it and with amazing stability is why I love using OS X so much!
-rob.
I've been wanting to launch a forum site for quite a while, but just never quite got around to looking into it more fully. When I finally did, I looked at a number of forum packages, both free and paid for. After some pretty intensive research, I selected vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com). At $160, this isn't necessarily cheap, but it's an astounding package. If you're considering forum software, I can highly recommend this package. It's nearly infinitely customizable, and nearly everything can be done through template editing, although you'll still want some relatively solid HTML knowledge to get the most out of it.
After picking the software, I got a copy running on my local OS X box via mySQL and PHP and the bundled Apache web server. I then uploaded this to the new ISP and started working on the site there ... but I forgot about my trip home for the holidays! Several weeks go by, and I realize that I need the site local on the iBook (which has never seen mySQL or PHP; I run those on my desktop). Of course, I realized this at 10:30pm on the evening prior to our departure!
Step one - enable PHP. Using a tip on the macosxhints site, this took about two minutes.
Step two - Install mySQL. Using Marc Liyanage's package installer (linked from macosxhints), this took about five minutes.
Step three - Get the site. I logged on to the ISP, and "tarred" (compressed) the entire site structure, then launched Transmit and dragged the tar file to my desktop. From there, open the terminal, move the tar file to the WebServer folder, and uncompress it. So now I had the site with all the modified files. This took maybe five minutes.
Step four - Get the database. On the ISP's server, I had installed phpmyadmin (http://www.phpwizard.net), an amazing web-based mySQL manager. Within phpmyadmin, I chose "dump data and structure", which created a text file of the entire database. I downloaded this with Transmit. This took less than two minutes.
Step five - Make a new local database. In the Terminal, I launched mysql and did a "create database vbulletin". This took a minute.
Step six - Import the data. From the command line, a simple "mysql vbulletin < dumpfile.txt" imported the structure and data into the new database. This took a minute.
The entire process, from start to finish, took maybe 20 minutes. The next day, I was happily working on the site at 30,000 feet jetting home to Denver! I worked on the site on the iBook for a week or so, returned home, and then moved the site to both my G4 desktop and back to the server, using basically the reverse of this process.
For the last two weeks, site development has occurred on my desktop G4 but "live" on the server, since nobody was aware it was there yet :-). Most times, I was running OmniWeb (for testing as the "unregistered" user), Mozilla with about 10 tabs open (customizing, admin testing, other site references), Transmit (for FTP to the server), TextEdit (for quick HTML edits), GoLive (for more complex HTML edits), Terminal (host connections via SSH), PhotoShop Elements (all the graphics were developed or modified in Elements), and my usual collection of "other" stuff like Office, iTunes, Mail, DragThing, GroupWise, and iPhoto.
During this entire time, including the work on the iBook, I have not had one single crash, and I was easily able to work in other apps while things like a 6,000 record database import took place in the background.
The ability to work on a number of completely different things, from a UNIX command line host to a full-blown graphics editor, at the same time with the same GUI over all of it and with amazing stability is why I love using OS X so much!
-rob.