I'm big fan of free software and data - but in this case, the members are expecting a bundle of additional products, services and discounts. While it's a non-profit organization with a very small turnover there are significant costs involved. Hence I felt it was a good idea to provide a more realistic alternative to Facebook on the Club site, including a members only area.
The first problem was the hosting. The site was using the starter package from HeartInternet. Although it was PHP enabled, the amount of storage was very small - allowing users to upload their own content would have filled the quota very quickly, and there was no database support. Upgrading the account to support the expected usage would have been exorbitantly expensive. So the first task was to find a hosting company.
While I can find lots of very cheap hosting companies claiming to operate in the UK - nearly all of them have their datacentres in the US/Canada. It's not that I've got anything against the former colonies - but I already have a site hosted in Florida, and although packets go back and forth at around half the speed of light (I measured it - how sad) the latency is a killer. I don't know if there's a paucity of UK service providers or if they're just not as good at SEO as the ones across the Atlantic, but this proved rather hard. There's also a large number of dummy review sites out there. But it did confirm that the prices on offer from HeartInternet were rather expensive. www.hostpapa.co.uk claim to offer UK web hosting with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage along with the usual PHP/MySQL combo for under £2 a month! It's only when you dig a little deeper you find out they have no UK Data Centres. I emailed them to ask if they could provide hosting in the UK - their reply: "for securit [sic] purpose we do not disclose the locations of our data centers".
Sorry hostpapa: FAIL
So, for the record, I did manage to track down jomongee, x9internet, 123reg (whom I already use for DNS) and Ronald MacDonald (I'm guessing no relation to the burger chain). Ronald is offering virtual servers at very low prices - although I'm a bit of a control freak, and am confident I could setup the server at least as well as most ISPs, I just don't have the time to do this - I'll just stick with a basic shared host. Notably none of these companies plaster their front pages with bogus awards and certificates. I'll probably go with x9internet - whom offer a reasonable hosting package, but what really swung it for me was the refreshingly honest way they appear to do business.
So that's the hosting side sorted out. I just need some software to run it all. Ideally the system would provide:
- a CMS for publishing web pages - basic navigation, user authentication, public and member only pages
- a forum where users could vote up/down posts and acquire points (like stack overflow)
- WYSIWYG editor for forum
- image uploads on forum posts
- billing/payment for membership via Paypal or similar
Looking around the interent, I chose Pligg, Anahita, OpenOutReach and Oxwall to look at in more detail.
I decided to start with Oxwall because it was (IMHO) by far the prettiest. However....
1. Finding the requirements for the software (even what platform it runs on) from the website was very difficult. There's next to no technical documentation at all.
2. The requirements which are provided (in the zip file - no tarball) were a cause for concern
- does not work with Suhosin
- requires a cron job to be run *every* minute
3. The requirements were incomplete - the package relies heavily on mod_rewrite
4. The installation instructions don't work - assuming that the installer is suppoed to amend the URL in "Go to http://www.mysite.com/install to run the install script" appropriately, I tried
http://localhost/mypath/install to get a 404 page
5. After running the installation script, the documentation goes on to tell the installer to run 'chmod 777' on all the directories created by the installation.a !!!!
6. Allowing the Oxwall .htaccess files to do anything they want:
Options -All -Multiviews
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
...Some progress - I got access forbidden (403) instead of 404 from the install URL.
7. The .htaccess file in the root directory contains:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
AddEncoding gzip .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gzip
ForceType text/javascript
/FilesMatch>
ForceType text/css
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index\.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/ow_updates/index\.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/ow_updates/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/ow_cron/run\.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.php|\.html|\.htm|\.xml|\.feed|robots\.txt|\.raw|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) index.php
....i.e. it's not going to work unless it's installed in the root directory
There's also a lot of other things which are, at best strange here.
Creating a new vhost and moving the files into the DocumentRoot still resulted in a 403 error
8. After moving my current /var/www/html elsewhere and moving the Oxwall files back into the default webroot, I still got a 403 error at http://localhost/install
9. Pointing my browser at http://localhost/index.php, I finally got some output from Oxwall! It told me "Your hosting account doesn't meet the following requirements: zip PHP extension not installed"
- yes, another undocumented dependency.
10. installed php-zip, and got a configuration form (although the absence of any styling was a hint that the URL rewriting still wasn't working properly)
I know getting web paths sorted out is not easy - but I hate front controllers. But trying to create an arbitrary namespace using mod_rewrite is just asking for trouble. (BTW the Oxwall wiki runs on Dokuwiki - which I've written about before and is very cool).
While I could probably fix the problems and get a working site together (probably even fix the cron silliness) it's just not worth the effort - that the software packaging has been so sloppy, means that there are probably lots more gremlins in the code - I do not want the site pwned by the first script kiddy to come along.
It's a shame that someone has worked so hard to produce something which looks so nice and appears to have a lot of functionality in it, but makes so many basic errors.
It's a shame that someone has worked so hard to produce something which looks so nice and appears to have a lot of functionality in it, but makes so many basic errors.
Sorry Oxwall: FAIL
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