BEdita Documents and Resources | Setup

Upgrade from BEdita 3.2 to BEdita 3.3

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 11:31:03 +0100

Instructions to manually upgrade your BEdita installation from 3.2 to 3.3

Currently BEdita has not an automatic system to upgrade from a version to another but you can follow the steps below to upgrade BEdita 3.2 to BEdita 3.3.

backup your old BEdita installation
remove the old version of BEdita and extract the new version in the same folder
restore from your BEdita backup bedita-app/config/database.php
copy your backupped file bedita-app/config/core.php to bedita-app/config/core.php
copy your backupped file bedita-app/config/bedita.cfg.php to bedita-app/config/bedita.cfg.php
make sure that bedita-app/tmp (and subfolders) and mediaRoot are writable by web server
execute the queries in:
- bedita-app/config/sql/upgrade/1.3.2-to-3.3-schema.sql
restore your frontends in frontends folder.

Choose and configure rich text editors

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:57:23 +0100

BEdita comes with two bundled rich text editors. CKEditor the default and TinyMCE.

Sometimes you could need to customize the rich text editor for example to simplify toolbar, add buttons, etc... or maybe you would use TinyMCE instead of CKEditor.

Do that in BEdita is quite simple, you have to change a configuration var in bedita.cfg.php file and eventually write your own rich text configuration.

File system structure

Rich text editors are located under bedita-app/webroot/js/libs/richtexteditors folder

webroot
|
|--js
    |
    |--libs
        |
        |--richtexteditors
            |
            |--ckeditor
            |--tinymce
            |--conf
                |
                |--local

where conf folder contains default configurations for ckeditor and tinymce.
Custom configurations for specifics BEdita instances would go in local folder.

Choose and Configure

In order to choose rich text editor and configuration, the richtexteditor var in bedita.ini.php

$config['richtexteditor'] = array(
    'name' => 'ckeditor',
    'conf' => 'ckeditor_default_init',
);

has to be overridden in bedita.cfg.php.
conf value is referred to richtexteditor/conf folder, so for example to use a file named ckeditor_custom_init.js located in conf/local folder the configuration var would be

$config['richtexteditor'] = array(
    'name' => 'ckeditor',
    'conf' => 'local/ckeditor_custom_init',
);

To create custom conf you should start from default con file and change what you need.
If you want to use TinyMCE with default configuration:

$config['richtexteditor'] = array(
    'name' => 'tinymce',
    'conf' => 'tinymce_default_init',
);

Requirements

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:53:51 +0200

Most LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql Php) hosts meet the minimum requirements to run BEdita. However BEdita can easily be installed also on other platforms like Windows or OSX, for example.

Just be sure that your host environment web server, database server and php are compatible with the version of BEdita you want to install.

BEdita 3.4 corylus - minimum requirements

Web server(**) Apache2
Database MySQL 5.1 or newer with InnoDB engine enabled, PostgreSQL 9
PHP 5.3 or newer with gd, mbstring and gettext (recommended) modules

(**) other web server like Nginx or Microsoft IIS should work but are not officially supported

Handling mod_rewrite in BEdita and CakePhp

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 08:21:19 +0200

How to fix mod_rewrite related issues on BEdita environment setup

BEdita is built to work with mod_rewrite out of the box, just like CakePhp. If something doesn't work nicely on your system, it can be related to apache/mod_rewrite settings.

Typical scenario: .css, .js and image file paths are wrong and BEdita interface is missing styles/images and appears almost blank (see screenshot at the end of this article).

Possible configurations:

mod_rewrite enabled (BEdita default setup)
mod_rewrite disabled (BEdita custom setup)

Check your apache configuration, for example using a "phpinfo" page:

Save under DocumentRoot directory a php file with content
```
 
```
Open that page with the browser and take a look in Loaded Modules: if mod_rewrite is already loaded, it's listed in that section.

If mod_rewrite is already loaded, default BEdita setup is ok for your system.

Decide if you prefer to change your apache configuration (enabling mod_rewrite) or you prefer to customize BEdita setup (for systems without mod_rewrite).

In case you want to change your apache configuration, you can find useful this CakePhp article about Apache and mod_rewrite and htaccess

mod_rewrite enabled - default BEdita setup

Default setup provides 3 .htaccess files and 'App.baseUrl' line commented, in $BEDITA_HOME/bedita-app/config/core.php.

$BEDITA_HOME/.htaccess
$BEDITA_HOME/bedita-app/.htaccess
$BEDITA_HOME/bedita-app/webroot/.htaccess
in $BEDITA_HOME/bedita-app/config/core.php:
- //Configure::write('App.baseUrl', env('SCRIPT_NAME'));

mod_rewrite disabled - customize BEdita setup

In order to let BEdita work with mod_rewrite disabled, it's necessary to remove the 3 .htaccess files and uncomment 'App.baseUrl' line in $BEDITA_HOME/bedita-app/config/core.php:

Configure::write('App.baseUrl', env('SCRIPT_NAME'));

Install BEdita 3.1

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:48:38 +0100

First BEdita 3.1 install

Foreword

Below you will see how to install a backend application. At the end of this procedure you will find a folder named frontends, containing some frontend examples. Start from here to develop a frontend application.
There is not an automatic setup/install procedure with a graphical user interface for BEdita 3.1 ulmus, but you have to follow some easy steps. A graphical user interface has been introduced from BEdita version 3.2 populus.

Before installing BEdita

First it is necessary that some preliminary requirements are satisfied. See BEdita requirements.

Download BEdita package

If your system does support the requirements listed above you can download the package. This package contains everything you need to setup and use BEdita.

There you will find the real BEdita application (bedita-app directory), the CakePHP framework (cake folder), the template engine Smarty (vendors/smarty dir) and the phpThumb library (vendors/phpThumb dir), and many other libraries used.

Quick install

Copy or unpack bedita directory (content of the compressed source package) in a directory served by the web server. Then:

create an empty database, create/choose a user with grants on data (DELETE, UPDATE...) and structure (DROP, CREATE,...)
edit bedita-app/config/database.php adding database connection details (host, user,...)
edit bedita-app/config/bedita.sys.php; in $config['beditaUrl'] write the web URL to BEdita installation, in $config['mediaUrl'] write the web URL to the media files, normally you can use $config['beditaUrl'] . "/files" .
make sure bedita-app/tmp is writable from your web server
if you haven't mod_rewrite enabled remove .htaccess files and uncomment App.baseUrl in bedita/bedita-app/config/core.php. For more detail read the Note below.
launch ./cake.sh bedita init to check your setup

Optional steps:

create a root directory for media files, served by your webserver; or use default dir bedita-app/webroot/files, already present
edit bedita-app/config/bedita.sys.php, in $config['mediaRoot'] write the absolute path to this media root dir, in $config['mediaUrl'] write the web URL to the same directory

Installation details

Here the same instruction from above in more detail.

1. Create the database

Just create an empty database on MySQL and define a mysql user having grants on data (INSERT, DELETE, etc....) and on structure (CREATE, DROP, etc....). Make sure you have stored procedures available on your installation.

2. Launch bedita init shell script

To initialize the system correctly, BEdita has a PHP script that you have to launch from the command line (a cake shell script, more precisely). Just go to the bedita directory above on the shell and type:

./cake.sh bedita init

(on Linux/Mac/*nix systems, on Windows use cake.bat instead of ./cake.sh). This script first checks your configuration, if it finds something wrong or not properly setup it will suggest you what to do. For instance if the database connection fails it will tell you which file to check and which variable to edit.

HINT: edit $default array in bedita-app/config/database.php, have a look at cakePHP documentation.

Don't worry!

There are just two files to edit, bedita-app/config/database.php for the database connection (look at the CakePHP docs) and bedita-app/config/bedita.sys.php where you have to define three fundamental variables for BEdita.

the first one is $config['mediaRoot'] that indicates a directory on your filesystem where BEdita will put any file uploaded (through a form) on the system. Verify that the webserver has the right permissions to read and write in this directory.
the second is $config['mediaUrl'] that indicates the base URL from which you can reach the uploaded files.
the third is $config['beditaUrl'] that indicates the base URL of your BEdita installation

Note: to define paths on filesystem you may use DS as generic directory separator, it will be "/" oni *nix systems (Linux, McOSX,...) or "\" on Windows.

You can obviously have more complex configurations creating the media directory somewhere else defining a virtual host that points to it (recommended for production systems).

Once the system is correclty configured the script wil create and initialize the database. At last it will ask if you want to check the status of BEdita, just press y and you will receive a short summary of your configuration.

Be aware of the permissions on bedita-app/tmp directory that has to be recursively writable from your webserver.

Note: BEdita is based on CakePHP framework. CakePHP is built to work with mod_rewrite out of the box (http://book.cakephp.org/view/37/Apache-and-mod_...). If you want/can use it (recommended) check if it's enabled, otherwise if you want to configure CakePHP not to use mod_rewrite remove .htaccess files in

/bedita/.htaccess /bedita/bedita-app/.htaccess /bedita/bedita-app/webroot/.htaccess

And uncomment the App.baseUrl in bedita/bedita-app/config/core.php

//Configure::write('App.baseUrl', env('SCRIPT_NAME'));

You can find more information in Handling mod_rewrite in BEdita and CakePhp

And now?

Open your browser and write on the address bar the location that points to your BEdita installation.

You will be redirected to the login page. Type bedita as username and also as password et voilà...have fun with BEdita!!

mediaRoot

If something goes wrong - 4 steps

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:10:21 +0100

4 simple steps to follow if your BEdita applications are not working

Your application is not responding, you have a blank page, some elements are not displayed, page layout is broken, you get mysterious error messages.....but you don't know what's going wrong and how to fix it? Ok, don't panic :-)

Here a simple checklist in four steps to use in such situations:

debug level - core.php - it's a common practice to set a debug level during development/testing of your application, you do so by setting Configure::write('debug', 1); in bedita-app/config/core.php in backend or in frontends/[frontend-name]/config/core.php in your specific [frontend-name] frontend. It may help: additional information should be displayed in your browser and in log files. Remember to remove debug level by setting Configure::write('debug', 0) for a production system.
view BEdita log files - backend log files are in bedita-app/tmp/logs folder for backend and in frontends/[frontend-name]/tmp/logs for your [frontend-name] frontend. Look at error.log file first, then view debug.log
view web servers log files - if you're using Apache usually these files are located in a common log directory for your web server, but you can specify other custom log directories for both backend and frontend. In typical Unix setup you may find these files in /var/log/apache2/ (without custom log directories). Read error.log first, then look at access.log.
get online support - if the problem is still obscure, write to our google group to get support

BEdita folder structure

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:51:35 +0100

A brief description of the most important files and folders (for developers)

Inside bedita folder you will see:

addons bedita-app bedita-doc cake frontends modules vendors

addons

BEdita addons, you can put here new components, helpers, models to extend or customize BEdita

bedita-app

This folder contains the backend/core application: a typical CakePHP application with controllers, components, models, views, etc...

bedita-app/config

Here you can find configuration files like database configuration (database.php) and BEdita instance configuration (bedita.ini.php, bedita.sys.php and bedita.cfg.php).

database.php: put database connection parameters (host, user, password, database...) in $default array;
bedita.ini.php: internal configuration parameters - DO NO EDIT! It may be overwritten on BEdita software update;
bedita.cfg.php: application and system/server configuration; here you can override some configuration parameters of bedita.ini.php like: languages used, default UI/content language for your application, semantic relations between BEdita objects (through objRelationType) and system settings like: beditaUrl (BEdita backend instance URL), mediaRoot (media files root folder), mediaUrl (mediaRoot URL), smtpOptions (smtp server configuration), etc...

bedita-doc

API doc folder, generate it with doxygen.

cake

the CakePHP framework

frontends

frontend applications; here you will find some examples: a simple site, a simple blog/wordpress like frontend, a dummy one, and a debug application

modules

BEdita plugin modules, to extend BEdita functionality

vendors

Third party libraries like Smarty or phpThumb.

BEdita shell: introducing command line tools

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:33:22 +0200

A collection of useful command line tools to execute simple tasks from shell

Command line tools are an important (and not well known) part of the BEdita framework.
There are many commands available to accomplish many tasks:

export or import a complete instance
send notification mails or newsletter
create a new BEdita instance
check instance status
remove cache and compiled templates

How do I use them?

There is a simple shell/batch script (cake.sh for Linux/Max/Unix cake.bat for Windows) to launch those tasks.
Point to the root BEdita directory with the command line where you have bedita-app, bedita-db, cake, vendors directories.

Under Linux or MacOSX (or other UNIX-like systems) type:

./cake.sh bedita help

Under Windows:

cake.bat bedita help

You will get some informations and usage hints regarding the main bedita script.
Now you can play with this script and discover what services it provides.

To name a few (without cake.sh/bat):

bedita cleanup - cache and compiled templates cleanup
bedita export/import - exports or imports a complete BEdita instance
bedita modules - adds/removes instance modules
bedita checkApp - checks application status, missing config files, db connections, checks main URLs, paths and permissions on filesystem

Besides the main script (bedita) there are other BEdita shell tools available:

dbadmin: some methods to check/fix some db data, some to insert test objects
gettext: parses views/php files, extracts i18n entries and updates .po files (gettext format)
mail: sends notification mail and newsletters
migrate: data migration scripts from previous BEdita versions
newsletter: some newsletter related tools (data import)

Upgrade from BEdita 3.1 to BEdita 3.2

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:02:10 +0100

Instructions to manually upgrade your BEdita installation from 3.1 to 3.2

Currently BEdita has not an automatic system to upgrade from a version to another but you can follow the steps below to upgrade BEdita 3.1 to BEdita 3.2.

backup your old BEdita installation
remove the old version of BEdita and extract the new version in the same folder
restore from your BEdita backup bedita-app/config/database.php
copy bedita-app/config/core.php.sample to bedita-app/config/core.php
copy bedita-app/config/bedita.cfg.php.sample to bedita-app/config/bedita.cfg.php and restore config vars beditaUrl, mediaUrl, mediaRoot from bedita.sys.php and any other configurations you did in old bedita.cfg.php. You can edit some of these configurations through the Admin module.
make sure that bedita-app/tmp (and subfolders) and mediaRoot are writable by web server
check if these two files exist:
- bedita-app/config/sql/upgrade/0.3.1-to-3.2-data.sql
- bedita-app/config/sql/upgrade/1.3.1-to3.2-schema.sql
and execute the queries of first file and then of second file. If some of these files are missing don't worry, it means that no relative queries for data and/or schema needs.
restore your frontends in frontends folder and follow the migration guide to make your frontends compatible with BEdita 3.2

Install BEdita

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:22:43 +0100

From BEdita 3.2 comes with a new web based wizard installer

From version 3.2 BEdita comes with a new web based wizard installer

Follow the instructions below to start working with BEdita

make sure your host meets BEdita requirements;
download the package;
unpack the package in a directory served by the web server. For instance (shell example):
```
tar -xvpzf package.tar.gz /var/www/bedita
```
(assuming that DocumentRoot is /var/www);
point your web browser to the url relative at your bedita folder (the system will show you a web wizard installer); following the above example, url would be something like http://localhost/bedita
follow these basci steps and configure BEdita
- Filesystem: set/check permissions
- Database: setup your BEdita database
- Admin User: create admin user for BEdita