CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi madamoo and welcome to the forum.   Your post reminds me of many that I have posted.

First let me say, being new to PHP and perhaps website installations that you may have a long road a head of you unless you get help.  Possibilities are hosting companies that offer CiviCRM installed and running for you.  Also there are consultants that can help.  See separate forum sections for help.  People with related charities may be willing to help you.

Of course, I frequently don't take my own advice.  While I do websites for a living with php and mysql, CiviCRM and CiviMail have been the largest and hardest applications that I've tried to tackle.

To address your questions directly.  Other than for CiviCRM, I don't use Drupal for anything else than CiviCRM, so I'm not sure whether Joomla or Drupal would be best for you.  Do you have experience with either?

As of the open_basedir, I thought this was a server security issue for cross site scripting - I'm pretty sure this security feature is used on my shared servers.  So - if you install your own Joomla, this may or may not be an issue for you.  Do you need root access to install Joomla? 

Max execution time.  I don't actually even remember how I installed CiviCRM other than I do remember that it took forever to upload the files and I wondered what the heck I was uploading.  I'm not sure if I did the manual or automated install.  A phpinfo() indicates 30 max execution time for me - I'm not sure what, but I think seconds - this sounds right, I know I've hit issues before with phpmyadmin imports and had to break them up with bigdump.  As for CiviCRM, the only thing that I'm aware of where execution time may be a factor for me is imports where I'm breaking up the spreadsheets for contacts into 500 or so records.

Best luck and be sure to report back as you make progress.

Hello again!

Thought I would provide an update... as I've now hit a different brick wall.

So I decided that I would create a new domain name and try Drupal there and add CiviCRM to there and see if I had better luck...

Installing Drupal was a relative and refreshingly logical process... I then installed CiviCRM... or tried too!! 

I did use the "automatic installation" although it isn't as automatic as I've become spoiled by with Joomla.

I fixed every glitch but one... and now am waiting to see if Netfirms can resolve this issue... (they had a systems wide failure this afternoon so I don't expect an answer today - want to have a near heart-attack? Have all of your sites disappear from all possible access points for 30 minutes... yup... it was not a good day to be a NetFirms customer)

OK - Sorry, I digress...

So here is the last hurdle I seem to have in order to install CiviCRM on a Drupal only site...

CiviCRM Database Details
Does the server exist   OK (localhost)
Are the access credentials correct   OK
MySQL version at least 4.1   OK (MySQL 5.0.24a-log)
Can I access/create the database   OK (Database 'd60455546' exists)
Can I access/create innodb tables in the database   InnoDB is not enabled in the database

Oh oracles of wisdom in the CiviCRM community... does anyone have a solution to this problem???

Thanks in advance for anything you can offer!!! 

Hi madamoo et al 

I am totally new at CiviCRM but am plugging away at installing myself.

I am currently working on getting CiviMail and it's dependencies working 

I have learned that many packages must be installed on your hosting server and if you are on shared hosting this will likely involve your host adding packages to the server and/or you updating your own server with the required packages.

So, I'm writing because I now, almost, have a server that supports CiviCRM and I'd be willing to create an account for you to get a development site working....PM if you're interested ?

Hello - please help a newbie!

I am working on a complete re-work of a charity website and I'm a newbie to PHP.

Our web host is netfirms.com and they offer Joomla - after trying unsuccessfully to add CiviCRM and reading many blogs and all of the great responses on this forum and others I contacted NetFirms and discovered that:

"open_basedir cannot be turned off nor can we set the max_execution_time to 600."

I'm not sure if you ever got this resolved.  In case you didn't, yes, there is a workaround.

1) max_execution_time
This can be overridden in your PHP script or in an .htaccess file in the root directory of your Joomla installation, assuming your host has not prevented you from having an .htaccess file.

In your script (the hard way) you need something like"

<?PHP ini_set('max_execution_time',600); ?>
Since you are a self professed noob to PHP, that's probably the hard way.  The easier way would be to modify your .htaccess file.

I've got a Joomla 1.5 install and it doesn't have one so chances are your Joomla install won't have one either.  If it doesn't exist, just create it.  In it put:

php_value max_execution_time 600
in it and save it. (upload it if you are not editing it live)

The .htaccess goes in the root dir of your site so usually www or public_html

2) open_basedir
I'm really surprised this is an issue as this is being depricated in PHP 6. I didn't realize people used it anymore. You can't disable it in the .htaccess but you can override the value. (If you have access to your httpd.conf file then you can disable it...I'm guessing you don't)

 I can't give you exact information on how to override this because I don't know what it's set to now but as general advice, it too can be overridden in your .htaccess.

Something like:
php_value open_basedir /home/path/to/my/domain.com
Oh and as to your InnoDB problem, you may want to check with your host to see if they have the InnoDB table type installed. If you are running a create script and it is specifying InnoDB tabletype and throwing errors, my guess is they don't.

HTH,

=C=