Requirements for Oscailt

Oscailt is a Content Management System designed to allow users to publish news and information on a web-site without knowing HTML or having a high degree of technical proficiency. It requires the following software environment:

Web server

The first thing that you need to run Oscailt is access to a webserver. This can either be a home-version on your PC or part of a commercial hosting package, or even your own dedicated server.

Oscailt definitely works with the Apache web server and it has been tested under MS Windows 2000, XP, FreeBSD, Mac OS and GNU/Linux with various versions of Apache 1.x and 2.x. There are no known compatibility issues with any webserver, but others have not been tested.

Apache Modules

Although Oscailt is designed to work on any webserver that runs PHP, our assumption is that it will mostly be deployed on Apache webservers. Therefore it is shipped with a .htaccess file which makes use of the apache mod_rewrite module as well as providing a relatively secure initial configuration. Oscailt uses this module to enable search-engine friendly URL's. If you do not have this module available on your server, Oscailt will work perfectly happily, although the URL's produced won't be as nice.

PHP

Oscailt requires PHP to be available on the webserver. PHP is a Free software programming language and is commonly available as part of commercial web hosting packages. See the php website

Oscailt requires PHP 4.x or PHP 5.x. It has been tested with several variations of PHP 4.3.x and PHP 5.0.x on diverse platforms and there are no known compatibility issues. There are possible issues with PHP 4.4.x There are a small number of incompatibilities with early version of PHP 4.0.x but they are highlighted in the code and should be easy to ammend.

PHP Modules

Several of the Oscailt modules rely on the GD image extension to PHP. The system is still usable without them but you will not be able to use the image tools such as the resizing of images to create thumbnail links, etc.

MySQL

MySQL is a free software database management system that is also commonly available with commercial hosting packages. Oscailt has no known compatibility issues with any version of MySQL on any platform. It has been tested with a number of versions of MySQL 4.x on MS Windows, GNU/Linux and FreeBSD.

Home Installs

For home installs and testing of Oscailt, you can download a PHP/MySQL/Apache bundle for any platform from several sites on the Internet (Google is your friend) and run Oscailt on your home machine. If you are running a distribution of GNU/Linux, it's generally best to install the appropriate software using the software packaging system that comes with your distribution e.g. If you are using Red Hat, Mandriva or Suse Linux, it's best to install the RPM packages. If you are running a Debian based distribution such as Ubuntu, it's best best to install from .deb packages - preferably using apt or a similar tool to solve dependency issues.

Resolved Issues

Oscailt-3-beta-2 One tester has reported on the Oscailt development list that "that it hangs when you run it in PHP5, because the OOP models aren't compatible, and PHP5 just throws blank screens when it meets something within a class that it doesn't recognize". - Resolved in Oscailt-3-beta-3

-- ChekovFeeney - 01 Sep 2005

Made a few minor edits - mostly correcting capitalisation -- AnthonyG - 04 Nov 2005

A few updates of issues fixed and discovered (thanks to Alster) -- ChekovFeeney - 12 Nov 2005