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$Id: README,v 1.30 2005/05/29 09:53:16 izzy Exp $

This is the README file I wrote for phpVideoPro v0.1.3 (and last updated for v0.6.7). As you may know, programmers get very lazy on writing documentation - so starting with point 3.), the information in this file may or may not fit newer versions, since I may have forgotten to update it. Don't be angry at me if this happens - just drop me a note about it - or even better, update this file (if you know the missing/changed information) and send it back to me, so I can replace it in the package :)

More documentation may follow (or not - see above ;) in the future, some even is already contained in the help system. But I'm more concerned about new features and, if needed, bugfixes to come asap, so again I may forget about the documentation - although I always try to keep at least the online help up-to-date to reflect the recent application state.

So I hope you can cope with this code, and wish you good luck - and enjoy phpVideoPro!

Itzchak "Izzy" Rehberg (izzysoft@qumran.org)

Contents: 1.) CopyRight 2.) Warranty 3.) Requirements 4.) Pre-Requisites / Installation 5.) Updating 6.) Administrative hints 7.) Known bugs / limitations 8.) Download and Sites

1.) CopyRight (and CopyLeft)

means

you'll have the source code available
you may run this program on as many machines as you want/have
you may copy and distribute it as much as you want - as long as you don't take money for it (and keep all files together!)
you may edit this code to fit your needs/wishes (please, let me know about improvements!)
you may use this code for own applications - but they have to be released under GPL then as well. For details, please read the file named LICENSE in the doc/ directory. If you release this program e.g. in a bundle of software on CD/DVD, release an article about this program etc, let the author know about this. Not that you need an explicit permission (as long as you stick to the above terms, especially the GPL) - you are even encouraged to do so. I just want to be informed about the fact to be up-to-date about all PR taking place ;).

2.) Warranty

This program is provided "as is" with no warranty (see GPL Par. 11). Especially this means, that the author is not responsible for any damages caused by the use of this software - explicitly or implicitly. The only thing I can guarantee you is: it will consume some disk space :)

3.) Requirements

There are a few things you have to make sure first (without them the whole program, including this setup, won't work at all):

have a webserver running (I just tested it with Apache)
have PHP running, at least v4.1 (a version less than this won't work; I recommend using Apache with PHP as loadable module, and that's the only combination I've tested)
make sure your PHP has built in support for the database you want to use (this has to be one supported by phpVideoPro, of course)! (if requirements
1. and 2. are met, point your browser to the setup/phpinfo.php file via http to see what features are supported by your PHP setup)
Supported databases are:
- MySQL version 3.28.32 or higher
- PostgreSQL 7.1 (?) or higher (may be lower, too - YOU need to report this)

4.) Pre-Requisites / Installation

If above mentioned requirements are met, we can start setting up phpVideoPro. To do this, follow these steps:

UNPACK THE TARBALL to a directory of your choice. It has to be located below your webservers document root (or you have to configure your webserver in a way it can use that directory, e.g. by creating an alias). Simple advice: use "tar xzf <tarfile>" to unpack it into the current directory. Probably you have already done this - since you are reading this file :)
rename inc/config.sample to inc/config.inc and optionally edit it to reflect your structures. Alternatively, this can be done with the configuration wizzard as well: in that case you only need to copy the new created config to its place lateron. The other settings (Hu? Ah, other files ;) you should leave unchanged. If you need more customization, you can do so later via the web interface.
now, point your browser to <phpvideopro>/setup/install/index.php, which starts the INSTALLATION WIZZARD. This wizzard will create your database (and, if necessary, also the user) and install the "skeleton" (all the technical data needed to run phpVideoPro). If you are going to restore from a previously created backup, this is also done here. The wizzard will guide you through the whole process.
After the wizzard has successfully finished the installation, you should protect the setup/install/ directory against unprivileged use. Either
- remove the directory
- move it somewhere outside your web tree
- protect it via the web server (e.g. with .htaccess file when using Apache)
- change its permissions with "chmod 0700 install" if the web server user is not its owner
If you are concerned about DISK SPACE, you may want to remove the
language support files for languages you won't ever use. By this, you will save about 100..250kB per language (with phpVideoPro v0.6.0 - may be more with future versions). I'm going to explain the removal of a language by the example of GERMAN. The German language has the code "de" (to find this out, you may want to look into setup/tech_data.sql and find the language together with its code at the end of the file). Remove German help files: delete the whole help/de directory. Remove German translations: delete the setup/lang_de.sql file (the translations may still be available if you loaded them into the database prior to this step). You won't destroy anything by these steps (as long as you don't remove files for the English [en] support, since these files ARE ALLWAYS REQUIRED by phpVideoPro). The worst thing to happen is, that the whole application may be English only, regardless of your configuration.
To SAFEGUARD YOUR INSTALLATION you should add the .inc file extension in your web servers config to be recognized as a PHP file. For Apache, search the config for the line AddType application/x-httpd-php .php and add the line AddType application/x-httpd-php .inc next to it, so nobody can browse your configuration file (if tried, the result then would just be an empty browser window - without this setting, the result would be the source code of the *.inc file). Moreover, you may want to protect the setup/install (see above) and setup/update directories by placing an .htaccess file (or adding the appropriate statements to your Apache config directly).
For the DATA RETRIEVAL FROM IMDB, phpVideoPro needs a directory to store the images in (as shipped, this is moviepic/imdb/). This directory must be readable and writable for the web server process, which - depending on the distribution used, runs under different users. To make this work out-of-the-box, the moviepic/imdb/ directory is read/writeable for everybody. You may want to change this, if you are concerned about security: as root user, own this directory to the web server user (e.g. "chown wwwrun:www moviepic/imdb") and make it writable for its owner only ("chmod 0755 moviepic/imdb"). You CAN do so if you are concerned, but you don't need it to use the functionality.

5.) Updating

When updating from a previous version of phpVideoPro, the steps to do follow easier rules. After updating the files (and comparing your config.inc with the new config.sample for possible changes), point your browser to the setup/index.php and just follow the update link there.

When updating from v0.7.6 or earlier, make sure to delete all PVP cookies whose names start with "imdb_tx" from your browser(s) cache (and if other people use your installation, tell them to do so as well). According to the specifications, browsers only capable of a certain amount of cookies per domain, so we combined a few settings to be placed into one cookie (instead of using multiple cookies).

6.) Administrative hints

Starting with v0.3.8, phpVideoPro supports a kind of "multi-user" environment. While the main configuration and default preferences are stored inside the database, user preferences can be managed via cookies. The biggest advantage of that is, that multiple users can use different filter settings at the same time, without overwriting each others settings (as it was until v0.3.7). This also concerns default settings as templates, data records per page for lists etc. For new users, defaults are loaded from the DB. If they change anything via the edit->preferences menue, changes can be stored into cookies and be loaded from there - if you specify so. For this, it is recommended to set up defaults via the admin->configuration menue, and optionally protect the admin part by placing an appropriate .htaccess file into the admin/ directory - so only authorized users can change configuration issues. Make sure to enable cookies in this form, otherwise the edit->preferences use the database as storage instead (but a separate table).

With v0.4.1, the multi-user capatibilities of phpVideoPro grew a lot. Now it contains a complete user management, including "permissions". By default, two users are created: admin (pwd: video) and guest (no pwd), and the guest account is strong limited (r/o) while the admin account has full access. You may want to login as admin first and adjust these settings (via the admin menue), and/or create new accounts. Make sure to change the admin pwd soon :)

7.) Known bugs / limitations

Any bugs are not known to me (or not to mention here - because I tend to fix them faster than I update this file ;) - I didn't find any (or fixed them immediately, as mentioned), and nobody reported anything still open recently :)

As for limitations: At least some versions of M$ Internet Explorer do have problems with the Hebrew support - but I don't know what to do about it...

One more limitation is regarding the (PS) Label system: it currently only supports ISO-8859-1 (and -15) characters, thus labels may look funny if you e.g. use Kyrillic letters with your movie descriptions. You are invited to supply a solution to this: the reason is the font encoding (and dictionary) within the PostScript templates. By supplying these blocks to us for other encodings, we could make these parts variable within the templates, so it should work for other encodings as well.

8.) Download and Sites

Two running demos are to be found on my private homepage using the URL http://www.qumran.org/homes/izzy/ - one of them, the developers demo, reflects the latest changes (and thus may be intermittently "broken" when larger changes take place), the other reflects the latest release. At the same place you will also find some information on some other projects of mine - for more, also visit my business site, http://www.izzysoft.de/ As a backup, you can also download the latest version at SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpvideopro/. The tarball of the latest available version should always be available by an "alias": http://www.qumran.org/homes/izzy/software/get_update?program=pvp should always send you the GNU-zipped tarball of the latest version (hopefully - if I didn't forget to update it :)
If you have questions/suggestions, you can also contact me via email, using the address izzysoft@qumran.org - and please, don't give up waiting if I do not respond that quickly; it sometimes takes me a while :)