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)
  1. Open up path_to_acs/packages/acs-core/apm/admin-www/version-install-4.tcl
  2. 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:
  1. 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.
  2. Log in to your site as a Site Wide Administrator.
  3. Go to /admin/apm.
  4. Click "Load a new package from a URL"
  5. Enter the URL for the portals package, probably something like http://your.server.name/portals-1.0.apm.
  6. 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.
  7. If the package was loaded successfully, you should see a page describing the portals package, and its status on your system.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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:
    1. Open a shell on your webserver and change to the path_to_acs/packages/portals directory.
    2. Start sqlplus, login using the username/password for your site.
    3. 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.
  11. 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:


$Id: install.html,v 1.1.1.1 2001/01/24 18:03:35 tarik Exp $
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