Installing Portals
Requirements
To install the portals package, you need ACS v3.4.x
or above. If you'd like to install portals on an ACS 4, this is not the
package for you. There should be a separate packaged released for 4.x.
Portals has been tested with ACS 3.4.4 - 3.4.7. If you're using v3.3, the
package may work, but hasn't been tested. As the Package Manager was
introduced with ACS 3.3, Portals will not work with ACS 3.2 or any
earlier version.
Obtaining Portals
You can always find the latest version of the portals package at the
software library at
arsdigita.com.
Before Installation
Before installing portals on ACS 3.4.6 and down, you need to make a small
patch to one package manager file: (This bug is fixed in ACS 3.4.7)
- Open up
path_to_acs/packages/acs-core/apm/admin-www/version-install-4.tcl
- Change line 12 from:
{sql_file_id:optional [list]}
to:
{sql_file_id:optional,multiple [list]}
Other things to be aware of before installing:
Installation
To install portals, you should have a copy of the portals APM package. It
will be called something like portals-1.0.apm (though the version number may
be different). If you don't have it, you should be able to download it from
arsdigita.com.
To install the package:
- Copy the package file to your web site's document root (probably
path_to_acs/www). In the future, you may not have to
do this, but currently (as of 3.4.7) the only way to get APM to load a
package file is to provide it with a URL from which it can fetch the
package.
- Log in to your site as a Site Wide Administrator.
- Go to /admin/apm.
- Click "Load a new package from a URL"
- Enter the URL for the portals package, probably something like
http://your.server.name/portals-1.0.apm.
- You should see a variety of status messages. Click "View information
about portals". If you get an error like "Unable to download. Please
check your URL" and you're sure that the URL is correct, check that
wget is available, as explained above.
- If the package was loaded successfully, you should see a page
describing the portals package, and its status on your system.
- Click on 'install'. You'll be presented with a list of the portals
data model pages:
- 00-portals-move-old.sql
- will remove any old portals data model that might conflict with
the new package. You should allow this file to load unless you
have a specific reason not to. If there is no portals data
model present, or if the data-model is current, this file will
do nothing. If there is an old data model present, and this
procedure is not run, portals will not install correctly.
- 01-portals.sql
- is the main portals data model, and must be loaded.
- 02-portals-data-feed.sql
- will install a number of useful
data feeds. If you don't
plan to use any of the predefined data feeds, uncheck this file.
- 04-load-default.sql
- will install a default 'users' portal. It is intended as an
example of the portals module's capabilities, and a
demonstration of how to use the various features of portals. If
you've already decided what you'd like your portals to look like
and you know how to set them up, don't install this file. If
you do decide to install the example portal, you can always
remove it later. Note that this file depends on
02-portals-data-feed.sql - it must be installed for
04-load-default.sql to function.
- Select the files you'd like to install. If you're not particularly
familiar with the internals of the portals module, and aren't sure
which to check, just install them all.
- After proceeding, you should see a list of the files that were
installed. Scroll to the bottom of this page and click "Proceed with
data model installation." If you get an error like You've supplied
two values for 'sql_file_id', you need to apply the one-line
patch detailed above. Back up using
your browser, patch the file, and click "Proceed with data model
installation" again. If you continue to have trouble installing the
data model files, you can install them manually using
sqlplus:
- Open a shell on your webserver and change to the
path_to_acs/packages/portals directory.
- Start sqlplus, login using the username/password for
your site.
- Type the following into sqlplus:
@ 00-portals-move-old.sql
@ 01-portals.sql
@ 02-portals-data-feed.sql
@ 04-load-default.sql
Be sure that you load the files in order.
However you end up loading the data-model files, you shouldn't see any
errors.
- Once data model installation is finished, you should be done. Go back
to the portals information at /admin/apm, and make sure that
it shows portals as installed and enabled. You may have to restart
your aolserver process to make the request processor aware of the
newly installed package.
After Installation
If you're not sure how portals works, you may find the
User's Guide helpful.
If you're more of a nerdy programmer type, you'll want to check out
the API documentation linked from the
Portals documentation index.
Other things to be aware of after installing:
- If you have a TemplateRoot configured in your site wide .ini file,
you'll have to copy
path_to_acs/packages/portals/www/templates/top-nav.adp
into it. If you don't have a TemplateRoot set, you shouldn't have to
change anything, but you may want to customize top-nav.adp for your
site's look and feel, anyway.
- If the right-hand borders of your portals look strange, and they probably will,
you should change the NormalTD setting in the
[ns/server/fooby/acs/portals] section of your
path_to_acs/parameters/yourservername.ini from:
NormalTD=<td><font face=arial,helvetica size=-1>
to:
NormalTD=<td colspan=2><font face=arial,helvetica size=-1>
$Id: install.html,v 1.1.1.1 2001/01/24 18:03:35 tarik Exp $
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