Copyright © 2006-2008 Global Moxie, LLC and Josh Clark
Big Medium and Global Moxie are trademarks of Global Moxie LLC. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Here’s a quick summary of how to install Big Medium; it’s a highly compressed version of what follows in the rest of these installation instructions. If you’ve installed Big Medium 2 before, or if you’re upgrading from a previous version of Big Medium 2, these steps will likely give you everything you need. If you require more detail, or if this is your first time installing Big Medium 2, skip this section and follow the detailed instructions.
Unzip the Big Medium download package.
Upload the moxiebin
directory to
your server’s cgi bin.
Upgrading from a previous version
of Big Medium 2? Do not delete the file named
bm-setup.pl
in your server’s
moxiebin
directory.
For Unix-based servers, set permissions to chmod
755
for the moxiebin
directory and
the .cgi
files inside.
Upload the moxiedata
directory to a
location above your web root directory.
Upgrading from a previous version
of Big Medium 2? Do not to delete any existing
directories in your server’s moxiedata
directory when you upload the new files. You can add or update
files to existing directories, just be sure not to delete
them. Do not make any changes at all to the
counters
, data
,
search
,
templates_custom
or
user_data
directories.
Upload the bmadmin
directory to your
server’s public HTML directory.
Upgrading from a previous version
of Big Medium 2? Do not delete or replace the
bmadmin/themes/_custom
directory (if it
exists).
Edit bmadmin/index.html
to update
the two marked URLs for the correct moxiebin location on your
server.
If you are upgrading from a previous version of Big
Medium 2, browse to bm-update.cgi
in your
moxiebin
directory, and your upgrade is
complete:
http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-update.cgi
For new installations, set up a cron
job to
run Big Medium’s maintenance script every 15 minutes. For
Unix-based servers, use the following command (updated to
reflect the actual location of your
moxiebin
directory):
curl -s -o /dev/null http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
For new installations, browse to
bm-start.cgi
in your
moxiebin
directory to run the setup
wizard, and your installation is complete:
http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-start.cgi
To install Big Medium, you must have the following:
Big Medium is software that runs on your web server. It supports servers running Windows and Unix-based operating systems (including Linux, OSX, Solaris, etc.).
Most web servers have Perl installed, but check to make sure before installing Big Medium. Big Medium requires Perl 5.6.1 or higher and will not run with previous versions. (If your server has an older version of Perl, that means your hosting company hasn’t updated the system since at least 2002; you might gently suggest that they upgrade.)
You must have the ability to run custom CGI scripts on your web server.
Your web server should support server-side includes for files with the .shtml extension.
Required to load Big Medium’s files to your server.
FTP stands for “file transfer protocol.” FTP allows you to move files to and from your web server and, on Unix servers, also allows you to set file permissions on those files. Many free or inexpensive FTP programs may be downloaded from the web. Popular FTP programs for Windows include Filezilla, WS_FTP and CuteFTP. FTP programs for Macintosh include Filezilla, Transit, Fetch and Interarchy.
Although not required to use Big Medium, it is highly recommended that you have one of these four image libraries installed on your server:
ImageMagick and PerlMagick, with Perl::Magick module
With at least one of these libraries installed on your server, Big Medium can size and manage your images for you automatically.
Installing these graphics packages is not for the faint of heart and does require server administration know-how. Check with your hosting company or server admin for help with installation.
The Big Medium control panel requires a modern web browser. The following browsers and minimum version numbers are recommended:
Internet Explorer 6+
Firefox 1.5+
Safari 3.0+
Camino 1.0+
Netscape 7+
Older versions of Safari and other Apple WebKit browsers also work with Big Medium, but do not support Big Medium’s WYSIWYG rich-text editing features.
The HTML markup generated by Big Medium for your public site is compatible with all browser versions. Pages created by Big Medium will work with any browsers for which your page templates are designed. Many of the page templates that ship with Big Medium, however, use design techniques that display correctly only in browsers that understand cascading style sheets. In practice, this means Internet Explorer 5+, Firefox, Netscape 6+, Safari, or Opera version 5+. You may, however, design your own custom templates to be compatible with any and all web browsers.
Before installing Big Medium, make sure you have all of the following files and programs:
A copy of the Big Medium zip file. The Global Moxie site provides two versions, one for Unix-based servers like Linux, Solaris or OSX, and one for Windows servers.
An FTP program such as WS_FTP or CuteFTP (for Windows) or Transmit or Interarchy (for Mac)
Also, make sure that you have the following server and website information in hand (your hosting service can supply this information if you do not know it):
The path to Perl for your server. On Unix-based servers,
the Perl path is typically /usr/bin/perl
.
For Windows, the Perl path is typically
C:\perl\bin\perl.exe
.
If your server is on Linux or another Unix-based system,
the path to sendmail
for your
server.
If your server is on a Windows system, the name of a SMTP e-mail server that will accept mail from your domain.
The directory path for your site’s web directory (where your web pages are stored).
The directory path for your site’s CGI directory, often
named cgi-bin
or
cgi
.
To upgrade from Big Medium 1.x, you’ll install Big Medium 2 alongside the previous version and, after the installation is complete, import your v1 sites into Big Medium 2 (for details on the installation process, see Appendix B: Importing Sites from Big Medium 1.x).
When you install Big Medium 2, be sure that you do not overwrite
the bmadmin
, moxiebin
or
moxiedata
directories from your existing Big
Medium 1.x installation. To be safe, change the names of these three
directories from your Big Medium download package:
Change moxiedata
to
moxiedata2
Change bmadmin
to
bmadmin2
Change moxiebin
to
moxiebin2
Going forward, when the installation instructions refer to
moxiedata
, bmadmin
or
moxiebin
, use the new “2” version of each
directory instead.
If you have not already unzipped the Big Medium zip file, go
ahead and do that now. Depending on your server configuration, you may
need to make a minor change to the 25 files ending in
“.cgi
” in the moxiebin
directory. The next two sections describe the necessary changes for
Unix and Windows servers, respectively. The relevant files in the
moxiebin
directory are:
bm-account.cgi
bm-build.cgi
bm-comment.cgi
bm-config.cgi
bm-css.cgi
bm-editor.cgi
bm-email.cgi
bm-help.cgi
bm-import.cgi
bm-library.cgi
bm-login.cgi
bm-maint.cgi
bm-mod.cgi
bm-plugins.cgi
bm-prefs.cgi
bm-reset.cgi
bm-review.cgi
bm-search.cgi
bm-sections.cgi
bm-siteconfig.cgi
bm-start.cgi
bm-templates.cgi
bm-themes.cgi
bm-update.cgi
ping.cgi
The files in the download package for Unix-based servers are
configured by default to run on servers whose Perl path is
/usr/bin/perl
, which is by far the most
common configuration. If this is the Perl path for your server,
you can skip ahead to the next step, “About
File Permissions”.
If your Perl path is not
/usr/bin/perl
then you have to update 25 of
Big Medium’s files with the correct path for your server. Among
the unzipped files in your Big Medium download is a directory
named moxiebin
. This directory holds the Perl
scripts for Big Medium. Using Notepad, BBEdit or another text
editor, open each of the files ending with
“.cgi
” and make sure that the top line of each
of these .cgi
files matches your server’s Perl
path.
For example, if your server’s Perl path is
/usr/local/bin/perl
, the top line of each
.cgi
file should be:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
The files in the download package for Windows servers are
configured to run on servers whose Perl path is
C:\perl\bin\perl.exe
, a very common configuration. If
this is the Perl path for your server, you can skip ahead to the
next step, “About
File Permissions”.
If your Perl path is not
C:\perl\bin\perl.exe
then you have to update
25 of Big Medium’s files with the correct path for your server.
Among the unzipped files in your Big Medium download is a
directory named moxiebin
. This directory
holds the Perl scripts for Big Medium. Using Notepad, BBEdit or
another text editor, open each of the files ending with
“.cgi
” and make sure that the top line of each
of these .cgi
files matches your server’s Perl
path.
For example, if your server’s Perl path is
D:\perl\bin\perl.exe
, the top line of each
.cgi
file should be:
#!D:\perl\bin\perl.exe
Big Medium requires that certain files and directories have specific permissions in order to work properly. The specific method for establishing these permissions depends on whether your web server is Unix-based (Linux, Mac OSX, Sun Solaris, etc) or Windows-based.
The chmod
command is used to set file
permissions in Unix systems. Throughout the installation
instructions, you will see instructions for setting
chmod
on various files and directories,
followed by the notation “(Unix only).”
Most servers allow you to send chmod
commands using your FTP program. For specific instructions, please
consult your FTP program’s instructions.
In most hosted Windows server environments, file and
directory permissions will already be set correctly, and you can
ignore the instructions about setting chmod
in
the installation instructions that follow (those sections are all
marked “Unix only”).
However, if Big Medium encounters a problem with permissions, you will see a message asking you to correct those file settings. Only an authorized system administrator can update permissions for the necessary directories.
Specifically, the Internet Guest User requires permission to
read, write, execute and modify (all permissions except “full
control”) for the moxiebin
directory. The
Internet Guest User also requires read, write, and modify
privileges for the site’s public html directory, the
bmadmin
directory and the
moxiedata
directory. (You’re about to upload
the moxiebin
, bmadmin
and moxiedata
directories as part of this
installation.)
If you’re updating from a previous version of Big Medium
2, be careful not to delete the file named
bm-setup.pl
in your server’s
moxiebin
directory when you upload the
new moxiebin
directory.
Open your FTP program, and connect to your server.
Set the program to upload files in “ASCII” mode or “Plain Text” mode (see your FTP program’s help files or instructions for help if you’re not sure how to do this).
Find your server’s CGI directory, usually named
cgi
or cgi-bin
. If you
cannot find this directory, check with your hosting company to
find out where you should install CGI scripts on your
server.
Upload the moxiebin
directory and all
of its contents to your CGI directory. You should now have a
directory named moxiebin
inside your server’s
CGI directory, and the moxiebin
directory
should in turn contain 25 .cgi
files, plus two
directories: Modules
and
plugins
. (If you are upgrading from a
previous version of Big Medium 2, you will also have a file named
bm-setup.pl
).
Set permissions on these files and directories to
chmod 755
(Unix only). If you are upgrading
from a previous version of Big Medium 2, do not change permissions
on the bm-setup.pl
file. (If you accidentally
change the permissions on bm-setup.pl
, you
can change them back by setting them to chmod
600
).
The permissions on the moxiebin
directory itself should also be set to chmod
755
(Unix only).
If you’re updating from a previous version of Big Medium
2, be careful not to delete any existing directories in your
server’s moxiedata
directory when you
upload the new files. You can add or update files to existing
directories, just be sure not to delete them. Do not make any
changes at all to the counters
,
data
, search
,
templates_custom
or
user_data
directories.
Switch your FTP program to “Automatic” mode if it has one, otherwise to “Binary” or “Raw Data” mode. The remaining file uploads for your Big Medium installation will be done in this mode.
If possible, you should upload the
moxiedata
directory to a location outside of
your CGI directory and above the web root of your server.
The web root is the directory where your webpages are
stored. Placing the moxiedata
directory
“above” the web root means that Big Medium’s data files will
not be accessible via web browser. For example, if your web
root is:
/home/mywebsite/public_html
...you should upload moxiedata
to
the directory “above” public_html
in the
/home/mywebsite
directory:
/home/mywebsite/moxiedata
If you do not have access to the directory above your web root, you have two additional options:
Locate the moxiedata
directory
in your CGI directory.
Locate the moxiedata
directory
in a browser-accessible location, but be sure that it is
password-protected. Your hosting company may provide a
control panel that lets you password-protect directories,
or if your server supports .htaccess
files, you can password-protect
the moxiedata
directory
manually.
After you have selected the location of your
moxiedata
directory, upload it to the
server.
If you have an account with a web hosting service, then
the web-server account is probably the same as the account
that you use to upload files to the server; in that case, set
permissions on the moxiedata
directory to
chmod 700
.
If Big Medium later complains that it does not have
permission to access the moxiedata
directory, try setting permissions on the account to
chmod 770
or, if Big Medium continues to
have trouble with the moxiedata
directory, try chmod 777
.
If you’re updating from a previous version of Big Medium
2, be careful not to delete or replace the
bmadmin/themes/_custom
directory (if it
exists). If you have saved any custom themes to your theme
library, those themes are stored in that directory. Deleting that directory would also delete your
saved themes.
Upload the bmadmin
directory and all of
its contents to the directory where you store your webpages. This
directory should be located somewhere outside of the CGI directory
and below the web-root directory so that it is accessible via web
browser, at a location like:
http://site.com/bmadmin/
Set permissions on the
directory (and all
files and directories inside) to bmadmin
chmod
755
.
If Big Medium later complains that it does not have
permission to access the bmadmin
directory, try setting permissions on the account to
chmod 775
or, if Big Medium continues to
have permission problems with the bmadmin
directory, try chmod 777
.
The Internet Guest User requires permission to read,
write, execute and modify (all permissions except “full
control”) for the bmadmin
directory.
Inside the bmadmin
directory,
locate the file named index.html
. In a
text editor like Notepad or BBEdit, open the
index.html
file in the
bmadmin
directory on your local hard
drive. You must update two URLs in this file to reflect
locations on your web server. The first is marked with this
comment in the file:
********************************************************************* UPDATE THE “ACTION” URL TO POINT TO THE DOMAIN WHERE BIG MEDIUM IS INSTALLED. FOR EXAMPLE: http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-login.cgi/login-verify *********************************************************************
…and again:
********************************************************************* UPDATE THE “HREF” URL TO POINT TO THE DOMAIN WHERE BIG MEDIUM IS INSTALLED. FOR EXAMPLE: http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-login.cgi/login-reminder *********************************************************************
Big Medium needs permission to read and write files in your site’s public HTML directory, which is where your site’s homepage file is located, for example. To enable this, please be sure that the web-server user account has full access to this directory.
If you have an account with a web hosting service, then it’s
likely that no change is required. However, if Big Medium later
complains that it does not have permission to read or write files in
the public HTML directory, try setting permissions on the directory to
chmod 755
. If you continue to receive an error, try
setting permissions to chmod 775
. And finally, if
you continue to receive error messages, try chmod
777
.
The Internet Guest User requires permission to read, write, execute and modify (all permissions except “full control”) for the site’s public html directory.
This step is necessary only if you are upgrading from a previous version of Big Medium 2; if you are installing a fresh copy of Big Medium 2, please jump ahead to the “Set up the Maintenance Script” section.
The updater script makes all of the necessary behind-the-scenes changes to bring your upgraded installation up to speed. When necessary, it also updates the public site(s) managed by Big Medium so that your visitors can immediately enjoy any new features. Until you run the updater, Big Medium will present a “Temporarily Unavailable” message whenever you try to access the Big Medium control panel.
To run the updater, browse to bm-update.cgi
in your server’s moxiebin directory. To do this, go to the following
location (updating the URL to reflect the location of the
moxiebin
directory on your server):
http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-update.cgi
Your upgrade is complete. Congrats, you’re done! You can stop here and go enjoy the smell of freshly upgraded software.
Big Medium has a script that runs regular maintenance tasks, including search indexing and the scheduled publication/removal of site content. This maintenance script should be run every few minutes (15 minutes is a good period for most sites) to ensure that all background tasks are being handled in a timely fashion.
If the maintenance script is not run regularly, a message will be displayed to Big Medium administrators when they sign into the control panel to alert them to the problem.
Your web server can be configured to run this maintenance script at regular intervals, and most web hosting plans offer access to the necessary tools to schedule this task. This is the preferred method to use, but if you’re not provided access to these tools, you can use an external service (such as that provided by webcron.org) to run the script for you.
However you do it, the goal is to trigger this URL every 15
minutes (updating it, of course, to point to the
moxiebin
directory on your server):
http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
Unix servers have a service named “cron
”
to schedule tasks, which are commonly called “cron jobs.” Most web
hosting plans offer a control panel for managing the server, and
this frequently includes an option for scheduling cron jobs. If
your hosting company does not provide a control-panel interface
for this, then you will need command-line access (telnet or SSH)
to your server to add the scheduled task, or your web hosting
company may be able to set it up on your behalf.
The interface for the cron job control panel will vary according to the software used by your hosting company. If you need help, check with your host’s tech support team.
All cron job panels, however, will allow you to schedule a Unix command to run at various intervals. You should schedule the job to run every 15 minutes. The specific command to use depends on the tools installed on your server. If you’re not sure, your hosting company can tell you which command your server supports.
Whichever of the following commands you choose, update the
http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin
portion
of the URL with the correct URL to the moxiebin directory on your
server.
If your server supports the curl
command
(the “-o
” below is the lowercase letter
“oh”):
curl -s -o /dev/null http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
If your server supports the fetch
command
(the “-o
” below is the lowercase letter
“oh”):
fetch -o /dev/null http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
If your server supports lynx
:
lynx > /dev/null -dump http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
If your server supports wget
(the
“-O
” below is the uppercase letter
“oh”):
wget -q -O /dev/null http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
If you have shell access to your server, you can add the
task using the Unix crontab
command.
Sign into your server using telnet or ssh and use the following command to export your existing scheduled tasks to a text file:
crontab -l > cron.txt
Open the cron.txt
file in a text
editor. You will add the new cron job command to this file.
The exact command depends on the software tools
installed on your server. Type the name of each of the
following tools on the command line one at a time until you do
not get a command not found
message:
curl
, fetch
,
lynx
and wget
. If you do
not get a command not found
message, that
tool is supported on your server.
After choosing your tool, add one of the following lines to
the bottom of the cron.txt file, replacing the
http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin
portion of the
URL with the correct URL to the moxiebin directory on your
server:
If your server supports the curl
command
(the “-o
” below is the lowercase letter
“oh”):
*/15 * * * * curl -s -o /dev/null http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
If your server supports the fetch
command
(the “-o
” below is the lowercase letter
“oh”):
*/15 * * * * fetch -o /dev/null http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
If your server supports lynx
:
*/15 * * * * lynx > /dev/null -dump http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
If your server supports wget
(the
“-O
” below is the uppercase letter
“oh”):
*/15 * * * * wget -q -O /dev/null http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
After updating and saving the cron.txt
file, type the following command on the command line:
crontab cron.txt
wget
Wget
is a tool that allows your server to
retrieve web files, and we will use it to run the Big Medium
maintenance script for you. You can grab a copy of
wget
for Windows from the wget website:
http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/
After you have downloaded and unzipped the zip file, copy the
wget.exe
file along with any
.dll
files directly inside the directory where
Windows is installed on your server. For example, typical
locations include:
c:\windows\wget.exe c:\winnt\wget.exe
In a text editor like Notepad, create a new file with the
following line, replacing the
http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin
portion
of the URL with the correct URL to the
moxiebin
directory on your server (that’s the
capital letter “oh” in `wget -q -O` below):
wget -q -O NUL http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
Save the file as bigmedium.bat
. You may
save the file anywhere you like on the server, but it’s strongly
recommended that you keep it in a location that won’t change and
is not accessible to the web server (in other words, don’t save
the file in the same directory as your HTML files on the
server).
Your server’s tasks are stored in the “Scheduled Tasks” directory in the server’s “Control Panel” directory. Go the “Scheduled Tasks” directory and click on “Add Scheduled Task.” The task wizard will launch.
After clicking Next, it will ask for the program to run.
Click “Browse...” and select the
bigmedium.bat
batch file that you
created.
Give the Scheduled Task a name (e.g., “Big Medium Maintenance”) and select to perform this task daily. Click Next.
Set the Start time to 0:00 and choose to perform this task every day. Click Next.
Supply your user name and password, and click Next.
Check the “Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish” option, and click “Finish.”
Click the “Schedule” tab and then the “Advanced...” button. Check the “Repeat task” option and set the task to run every 15 minutes. Beside “Until,” check the Time option and enter the value 23:59. Click OK.
Click Apply to save all settings.
If you do not have access to the necessary tools to schedule the maintenance script using the methods described above, you can use an external service to run the script on a regular basis.
This is not as reliable as the other methods, however, and relies on the uptime of the external service. Use this method only as a fallback if you’re unable to schedule your server to run the job.
There are a variety of free and paid services that will
visit web pages for you on a fixed schedule. One such service is
webcron.org (this is
not an endorsement of the service, only a pointer to one of many).
After selecting your external service, follow the service’s
directions for setting up your scheduled task. The service should
request the following URL every 15 minutes (with the URL updated,
of course, to point to the bm-maint.cgi
script in your server’s moxiebin
directory):
http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-maint.cgi
Whew, congratulations, the hardest part is over! The rest of your Big Medium installation takes place in a friendlier environment: your web browser.
To start the Big Medium setup wizard, go to this location in
your browser, adjusting the URL as necessary to point to the
moxiebin/bm-start.cgi
file on your server:
http://site.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-start.cgi
Provide your organization name and administrator e-mail address in the requested field and click “Onward.”
This page asks for several directory paths and URLs to help Big Medium get its bearings on the server. Use the help links for detailed info and suggestions about the locations of these directories and URLs.
If you are installing on the same server where another
Big Medium 1.x installation is already installed, you should
have changed the names of the bmadmin
,
moxiedata
and
moxiebin
directories. Don’t forget to use
those changed names (e.g. bmadmin2
,
moxiedata2
and
moxiebin2
) when entering them into the
form.
The “Firewall” panel on this screen allows you to enter proxy server information. If you rent a web server from a standard hosting service, you almost certainly do not have a proxy server, and you can leave these fields as-is; move along, nothing to see here.
However, if your web server is part of a private network, it may use a proxy server to connect out to the Internet. Check with your server administrator if you’re not sure. (You can also leave this field as-is for now and fill it in later via the “Settings>Big Medium Server Info” screen in the control panel after running the setup wizard.)
Big Medium offers the option to use the Akismet online service to check visitor comments for spam and, if they’re spammy, prevent them from being posted to your pages. If you plan to enable visitor comments on your site(s), this feature is highly recommended.
In order to enable Akismet, you need to enter your 12-digit Akismet key in this field. For information about Akismet and obtaining a key, see Appendix A: Spam Prevention with Akismet .
If you don’t want to use Akismet, or if you’re not sure, you can leave this field blank. (You can always supply the key later via the “Settings>Big Medium Server Info” screen in the control panel after running the setup wizard.)
Enter the user name, e-mail address and password information for your Big Medium administrator account, then click “Onward.”
This page asks for the name, URLs and directories for your first site. The help links offer detailed help and suggestions for choosing these directories, but briefly...
The path and URL of the directory where you would like Big
Medium to build and store the homepage for this site. In most
cases, this is the web root directory of your site. For example:
http://site.com
However, if you already have an existing site, you may want
to set this to a temporary directory so that your new site does
not interfere with your current site until it’s ready to go. For
example: http://site.com/bm
The path and URL of the directory where you would like Big Medium to build and store all of the non-homepage files and pages for your site.
After choosing the name, URLs, directories and time zone for your new site, click “Onward.”
You’ll be asked to confirm that you can see two images. If you can, this indicates that you have filled in the correct values for your site directories and URLs. If not, you need to try again. Click the “Yes” link if you see the image, or click “No” if not.
Your site will consist of the homepage and one or more content categories, or “sections.” Sections are the organizational tools that you use to categorize content on your website, and the primary navigational method that your visitors will use to move about the site.
Sections can be one-pagers (like a “Contact Us” page), but more commonly they’re containers for lots of web pages (like “News,” “Business” or “Sports” sections in a newspaper website). This page lets you define the sections of your site.
To add a new section, click the “Add main section” link and give the section a title and a “slug name.”
The slug name is a kind of internal nickname for the section and also determines the name of the directory where the section’s pages will be found. For example, a section with the slug name “news” might have its pages in the directory: http://site.com/bm/news ...and if you have a “Local News” subsection of this news section, with a slug name of “local,” that subsection’s pages would be located here: http://site.com/bm/news/local
To add subsections to your new section, click the section name and then “Add subsection” and fill out the form with the title and slug name of the new subsection. When you have created your sections -- or at least enough to get started -- click “Onward.”
“Themes” determine the look and feel of your site. Select a design theme by clicking “Apply” next to the theme that you want (or “details” to see a preview). Never fear, you won’t be locked in. You can choose another theme later, customize this theme, or create your own design from scratch. For now, choose a theme to get started.
Your site is now ready for editing. You can get started right away by clicking the “Welcome to [site name]” link in the edit menu and editing the text on the home page. Or click “New Article Page” to create a new page in one of your site sections.
Or, if you are upgrading from Big Medium v1, you’re now ready to import your sites into Big Medium 2. See Appendix B: Importing Sites from Big Medium 1.x for details.
Big Medium is free to use for the first 30 days. During this time, you can enjoy the software’s full functionality without spending a dime. After the 30-day trial period, Big Medium’s administrative interface will stop working until you purchase a license and register the installation with your license code.
To purchase a license, visit:
http://globalmoxie.com/buy/
What’s more disheartening than having spammers vandalize your site with scrawled comments about Viagra, ringtones and dark visions of Paris Hilton? To help prevent such comments from seeing the light of day, Big Medium offers the option to use the Akismet anti-spam service to screen comments for spam.
The brainchild of Wordpress phenom Matt Mullenweg, Akismet is an online service that torture-tests comments with hundreds of tests and then tells Big Medium whether or not it’s spam. If a comment has the scent of processed ham, Big Medium chucks it into the spam bin instead of posting it to the site. Spam comments are deleted automatically every 15 days.
If a good comment is incorrectly identified as spam (a “false positive”), never fear. Accounts with publisher privileges or better can review spam comments, approving the good comments. This also triggers Big Medium to notify Akismet about the mistake, helping to improve Akismet’s filtering in the future.
Likewise, if a spam comment manages to escape detection, you can mark the comment as spam, and Big Medium will remove it from the site and inform Akismet about the spam message.
In order to enable Big Medium to communicate with the Akismet service, you have to sign up for an Akismet “key.” This key is a special identifier, like an account name.
Akismet keys are free for personal sites and have a modest licensing fee for commercial sites. The key is used for all sites managed by your installation of Big Medium; if you use Big Medium to host one or more commercial sites, you should purchase a commercial license. For information about obtaining your Akismet key and licensing options, please visit the Akismet site:
http://akismet.com/commercial/
To make Big Medium Akismet-ready, you simply need to give it your 12-digit Akismet key. You have the option to do this when you’re first setting up Big Medium, in the second screen of the setup wizard, or administrators can add the comment in the “Settings>Big Medium Server Info” screen after Big Medium has already been configured.
After supplying your key, Big Medium will, by default, submit new comments from all sites to Akismet. You can disable Akismet service for an individual site in the “Visitor Comments” screen of the site’s HTML preferences.
Administrators can import accounts and sites from previous versions of Big Medium by selecting “Settings>Import Legacy Sites” in the control panel. The importer can import data only from v1.x installations on the same server. The accounts and sites are copied into Big Medium 2, leaving the original data from the v1.x installation untouched. This allows you to keep your original v1.x site running while you transition to your new v2 site.
The first screen of the import process prompts you to supply
the location of the original v1.x moxiedata
directory. Enter the directory path and click Continue.
The next screen asks you how and what you would like to import. Select your preferences and click continue.
Click the “All sites” tab to import all sites from the v1.x installation, or click the “Selected sites” tab to import only certain sites. (You can choose to import selected sites now and then import the rest later). Use CTRL-click (or Command-click on Mac) to select more than one site in the “Selected sites” tab.
The default (and recommended) setting is to create the imported sites in new HTML directories so that the public v1.x site remains untouched. Later, when you’re ready to take your new Big Medium v2 site live, you can move the HTML directory to replace the old v1 site.
If you prefer to have Big Medium import the v2 site into the same directory and immediately replace the v1 site files, uncheck the “Build all imported sites in new directories” option.
You’ve already created at least one administrator account in your v2 installation, and perhaps others, too. The importer needs to know what to do if it runs into accounts with the same user names from the v1 installation.
The default handling of duplicate user names is to assume that both v1 and v2 accounts refer to the same person. The privileges for v1 accounts and sites are extended to v2 accounts of the same name, “merging” the privileges of the two installations.
Unchecking the “Apply v1 privileges to v2 accounts of the same name” option instead tells Big Medium to create new accounts under a new name when it encounters a user name that already exists. For example, when Big Medium imports an account named “mary,” and an account already exists for “mary,” it will import the v1 account as “mary-2.”
The next screen does the actual data import. If you’re running Big Medium on a Unix-based server, a progress bar will show you where you are in the process. Sites with hundreds or thousands of pages may take a couple of minutes to import.
The progress bar will show “DONE” when the import is complete.
To edit your imported sites, sign into Big Medium as usual. Click the “Switch sites” link in the left column to select the site to edit. From there, you can visit the public site by clicking the site’s name under “Now editing” in the left column.
The location of the public site depends on the “Directories” preference that you chose before importing.
If you chose the default “Build all imported sites in new directories” option...
You can find the site in a page directory relative to the original site’s page directory. For example, if the original v1 site’s page directory was located here:
http://www.example.com/moxie
...then the imported site will be located here:
http://www.example.com/moxie-bm2
For sites whose page directories are the same as the domain root:
http://www.example.com
...the imported site will be located here:
http://www.example.com/site-bm2
If you did not choose the “Build all imported sites in new directories” option...
You can find the site in the same location as the original v1 site.
If Big Medium encounters a problem (if it does not have permission to create a directory, for example), the import process will stop, and Big Medium will display a message explaining the problem.
After resolving the issue, you can restart the import process by going back to the beginning: Select “Import Legacy Sites” from the Settings menu of the Big Medium control panel.
The importer is clever enough to figure out where it left off so that it does not import the same data twice with one exception: When resuming a stalled import, be sure that you leave the “Apply v1 privileges to v2 accounts of the same name” checked. Otherwise, Big Medium will import all of the v1 accounts a second time under a new name.
The importer handles most site designs smoothly, but there are some changes and incompatibilities that may require minor changes to imported sites. These design variations can be addressed by editing the site’s templates and/or theme style sheet.
To edit templates, go to “Layout>Edit Templates” in the Big Medium control panel, and click on the template to edit.
To edit the theme style sheet, which contains your site’s custom CSS styles, go to “Layout>Edit Theme Style Sheet.”
This section describes common design inconsistencies for imported sites and solutions for common problems.
The HNAVIMAGE
, VNAVIMAGE
,
HSUBNAVIMAGE
and VSUBNAVIMAGE
widgets
from Big Medium 1.x are not supported in Big Medium 2. The
importer handles this by generating the final HTML output for
these widgets and embedding it directly into the templates of the
imported site.
This creates navigation bars that are identical to those in the original v1.x site, but they are no longer updated automatically by Big Medium. This means that section changes (e.g., new, reordered or deleted sections) are not automatically reflected in the site’s navigation without separately updating the templates.
If you don’t plan to add or change sections in the imported site, then no problem; move along, nothing to see here.
But if you want Big Medium to be able to update the section
navigation automatically, you should replace this generated
image-navigation HTML with one of Big Medium’s other navigation
widgets, <%navigation%>
or
<%subnavigation%>
.
These navigation widgets are text-based. If you prefer to keep your image-based navigation, the Global Moxie site offers a tutorial on creating graphical navigation bars from Big Medium’s text-based widgets.
In Big Medium 2, announcements behave more like page content than they did in previous versions.
The ANNOUNCE
widget in Big Medium 1.x
displayed only announcements that were assigned specifically
to the current section. In Big Medium 2, the
<%announcements%>
widget displays
announcements that are displayed in the current section,
plus all subsections.
As a result, pages that displayed just one announcement in Big Medium 1.x may now display several announcements. The homepage, for example, will display all announcements from the entire site.
If you used the v1.x ANNOUNCE
widget as a
way to display editable text on section pages, you may find it
more convenient to replace the
<%announcements%>
widget on section
templates with the <%content%>
widget.
If you relied on previous versions of Big Medium to resize your images to precise dimensions, and if your server does not have one of the recommended image libraries installed (ImageMagick, GD, NetPBM or Imager), images will be displayed in their original size instead of the resized version that you had in previous versions. This could result in very large images being shown in places where you want much smaller images.
This same issue applies to images entered as URLs in Big Medium v1 (as opposed to uploaded image files). Even if you have the image libraries described above, Big Medium does not resize images entered as URLs, and they will instead be displayed in their original size.
You can resolve these issues by adding specific heights and widths for each type of image in your theme style sheets.
Example B.1. Enforce image dimensions via CSS
div.bmw_link img { /* link images, a.k.a "thumbnail images" in v1 */ width: 175px; height: 100px; } div.bmw_spotlightLinks div.bmw_link img { /* spotlight images */ width: 200px; height: 200px; } div.bmw_pageContent img { /* "body images" embedded in article text */ width: 300px; height: 200px; }
Big Medium 2 introduces two changes to the way that related links are displayed below links to a page. (There are no changes to how related links are displayed on the page itself, only with promotional links to the page.)
Previous versions of Big Medium simply separated related
links with <br>
line breaks. Big Medium 2
puts them into a <ul>
bullet list. To make
the display look more similar to the v1.x format, add these
styles to the theme style sheet:
div.bmw_link ul, div.bmw_link li { margin:0; padding:0; list-style:none; }
Previous versions of Big Medium displayed only the first two related links alongside links to a page. Big Medium 2 now shows all links. You cannot choose individual related links to be displayed with links to the page; it’s all or nothing. You can turn off the display of related links as part of link content in the site’s HTML preferences: “Settings>HTML Preferences>Links.”
In previous versions, page content and link widgets would
wrap around floated or left/right-aligned elements (including the
v1.x TOOLPANEL
widget) that came immediately before.
In Big Medium 2, those layouts now create a “gutter,” and the text
that used to wrap no longer completes the wrap.
If you don’t want this effect, you can fix it by adding a custom style in the theme style sheet:
div.bmw_pageContent { overflow:visible; }
Big Medium 2 has changed much of the underlying markup and CSS of sites generated by Big Medium. If your site relies on custom CSS changes to the CSS styles of Big Medium widgets, those changes will probably not work in Big Medium 2.
Feel free to lean on the Big Medium support forum to revise these CSS hacks. Post your questions, along with before-and-after links to the v1 and v2 pages that display the problems, to the Big Medium 2 support forum.