and yet the craziness persists

After praising dokuwiki in my earlier post, it promptly fell over sideways and refused to work properly for the blog plugin. Then I was reminded of the hassle of not having root access on my shared web server at A Small Orange. All my dokuwiki files were created as the web server user, not my own user. No love chmod/chgrp'ing the files so that I could edit/modify/delete them.

Then I came across a post in the ASO Forums stating that running under PHP5 and fastcgi would remove the need for the code to run as the web server. I added the following to the dokuwiki .htaccess file:

AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php

…and then I saw lots of errors about PHP failing to create the session files needed under /tmp. Although I didn't see any reason to run into permission problems under /tmp, I added a line to my .htaccess to define a new, definitely-writable location for the session files:

php_value session.save_path <a writiable directory in my home dir subtree>

I moved the original dokuwiki install out of the way and unpacked a fresh version of the distribution archive. Then I added the above lines to the .htaccess file and re-ran the install.php process. Initially there were still some errors, as if the new save_path was not being used. But after some continued poking and prodding of various dokuwiki page and admin URLs, the errors stopped an all has been smooth since. Not sure if I was running into browser or proxy caching, or the errors went away for some other reason. (Gotta like that uncertainty…not so much.)

Since dokuwiki is all text-based goodness, I copied my previously-created pages into the new wiki and reinstalled the blog-related plugins – all seems good.

P.S. This, as history can show, is exactly what happens every time I try out a new blogging platform or approach. Nearly all new posts for an unseemly period of time don't discuss life, interesting technology, fun places to ride, or any of the meaningful questions of life. No, the brief bursting forth of new blog posts is inevitably dedicated, almost in its entirety, to discussing the new blogging platform itself. <shakes head>

~~DISCUSSION:off~~

blog/and_yet_the_craziness_persists.txt · Last modified: 2008/12/31 11:42 pm by mike
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