Callandor

Well, the install and setup of Textpattern, the blogging software I’ve settled on (for now?!) was interesting. It didn’t quite work out of the box, probably because of Debianisms.

The install was a simple sudo aptitude install textpattern, and the installer gave me the option of using dbconfig-common to set up the initial database parameters. I ended up purging and installing textpattern a few times, and in the end did not let the installer use dbconfig-common. Instead, I created a MySQL database and user myself, and then edited /etc/textpattern/debian-db.php. The install process did give me the option of automatically configuring lighttpd, my HTTPd of choice, to enable textpattern, which was great.

The main sticking point was finding how to do the initial setup once the install was done. First, you have to access the magic setup URL from localhost. For me this meant I had to SSH tunnel my browser and then navigate to the magic URL, http://127.0.0.1/textpattern/textpattern/setup. Why the two “textpattern“s?

I was also given trouble by the PHP (make sure your safe modes are set to allow MySQL connections), my specific Web server config (forgot to add index.php as an “index-file-name” for connections coming from 127.0.0.1/8 and 192.168.0.1/24) and file ownership problems. I have to find out how to tell Debian I changed the name of the web server user so it stops chowning files to www-data.

And for the record, I was getting the mysterious (and rare on Google) error
Warning: mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /usr/share/textpattern/textpattern/lib/txplib_misc.php on line 180 at one point. I think in the process of solving other problems and finding the right URL I solved this, I don’t remember specifically solving it.

Now, I have to look into plugins for textpattern, and themes especially.