NOTE: shell.uoregon.edu is now sftp.uoregon.edu

Ever wanted to have your own webpage at http://uoregon.edu/~YourDuckID? Ever wanted to setup a clean-looking, easy-to-maintain website for a student group your are associated with? Well now the whole process is a snap! Every University of Oregon student is given space to set up their own website.

It’s a fairly complex process to set up all the necessary tools (PHP and MySQL) manually, so I wrote a program to do it for you (mostly) automatically! All you need to do is login to your uoregon.edu account and follow a couple simple instructions.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is tool that lets you create, design and maintain a website without knowing anything about computers or the internet. Anyone can do it! It is meant to be a tool for bloggers, but it functions perfectly for those who just want a normal website.

WordPress can be as simple or as powerful as you need it to be. In my opinion, it is the perfect tool for student groups because of how often management changes. With WordPress, anyone can pick it up and make any changes without any knowledge on how to create websites. The real power of WordPress is that you can create/edit pages from a web interface using an WYSIWYG (visual) editor. You can see a demo of this web interface here (username: admin // password: demo).

Other features:

• Customizable themes so you can easily style your website and give it it’s own distinct look.
• Amazing plugins to let you add any kind of functionality to your website (e.g. adding a contact form to your site).
• Multi-user enivronment so you can add other bloggers/editors to help you edit the website. This is especially useful for student groups with a lot of contributors.

Getting Started

Before you can complete these instructions you will need a program that let’s you access the files on your sftp.uoregon.edu account. Accessing this account is called “SSHing” into it. This is fairly simple for Mac OS X users, but is a bit more complicated if you are using Windows.

You can enable shell access by going to:
http://duckid.uoregon.edu
Select “Manage Optional Account Access”
Then hit “Enable Shell Access”

Windows Users

Note: If you own a Mac, skip to the next section called “Mac Users”.

First, you need to download and install a program called PuTTY (or just download v0.60 directly).

Once it is installed, run it and follow these steps.

Enter sftp.uoregon.edu under the host field. It should look the image to the right.

Press OK. You should get a message saying there is a “Security Alert”. Just press Yes.

Now you’re almost ready to go. Just enter your Duck ID (the same one you use to login to your email and blackboard) and your password. If you’re doing this for a student account, the process is exactly the same, but with the username/password that you would use to login your groups email address. It should look like this:

You’re ready to move on! Go on down to the “Running the Script” section below.

Mac Users

Mac OS X users have it much easier because the program you need is already installed.

You just need to run the Terminal application. The quickest way to get it it is by using the searching for it using the search box (Spotlight) in the top right corner of the screen.

Once that program is up and running you just need to use your Duck ID (the same one you use to login to your email and blackboard) and your password. If you’re doing this for a student account, the process is exactly the same, but with the username/password that you would use to login your groups email address. Here’s what it looks like when I use my Duck ID (jblancha) and password:

Running the Script

Now that you have SSH’ed into you account, you’re ready to run the script!

Type each of the following commands in and press enter after each line. The first command will take a couple moments to run, so don’t type the next one until it is done.

wget http://auzigog.com/perm/wordpress_shell.sh
chmod 0755 wordpress_shell.sh
./wordpress_shell.sh

The last command will run the script I wrote to do all the work for you.

The first thing you need to do is type n and press enter to indicate that you are not an advanced user. Now you should see a bunch of lines being output to the screen.

*** Do you want to install MySQL using the 'mysql_install_db' command? You should do this ONE TIME ONLY
Are you an advanced user who needs the MySQL passwords later? [y/n]: n
// Creating .htaccess in your public_html directory (/home6/spanst/public_html) so all files ending in .php will execute
// Creating php.cgi in your home directory (/home6/spanst) so all files ending in .php will execute
// Generating a port number (between 5000 and 6000) to run MySQL from
// For reference, the port number that MySQL is running on is: 5430
// Making a MySQL configuration file for your account
// Installing the MySQL database. This may take a few moments...
// Setting a root password for wordpress
// Creating a username and password for wordpress
// Configuring a cron job to ensure the MySQL Daemon doesn't go down
// Downloading and placing wordpress files. This may take a moment....
// Creating public_html/wp-content/uploads for uploaded images/files
// Configuring wordpress

// Here is some stuff you can ignore if you don't know what it is:
   PORT: 5430
   MySQL 'root' account password: ########
   MySQL 'wordpressuser' account password: ########
   MySQL database for wordpress: wordpressdb
   MySQL host for connections: sftp.uoregon.edu:5430

SUCCESSS! Visit http://uoregon.edu/~spanst to finish the installation of your blog!
Note: Please remove index.html from your ~/public_html folder so that WordPress can actually work

Note: Please write down the four lines that start with MySQL in case you or someone else ever needs those passwords to fix things down the road.

As the script indicates, you’re done! You can now visit http://uoregon.edu/~YourDuckID/ to give your blog a name. When it asks you for an email address, be sure to use a real one because it that is where your username and password will be sent.

To login to the control panel (where you edit pages and blog posts), go to http://uoregon.edu/~YourDuckID/wp-admin/.

There’s some more information below that you might find helpful, but you’re basically done! If you’ve successfully used this script, please leave a comment below so I know that people are finding it useful. Spread the word to other individuals and groups so everyone can create a useful website!

Extending WordPress

You’re done with the important part. If you want to customize WordPress, here are some suggestions.

• Install a theme to give your site its own look. Check out my favorite themes. (Instructions)
• In the control panel, go to Settings → Permalinks → Select “Day and Name” → Save Changes
• Add a contact form to your site
• Add other authors/editors to your site by going to the control panel and Users → Add New
• Setup Akismet to block spam comments on your blog posts

If you need any other help in working with WordPress, check out their support site.

Good luck! Please leave a comment below if you have any comments or questions!

What the heck did the script do?

If you’re not a big nerd, just scroll down to the comments section. If you’re a more technical user and are curious what happened, here’s an overview. You can find very detailed instructions for all of this on my wiki.

1. Use a .htaccess file to redirect all .php requests to a CGI script
2. Use the CGI script to make sure all .php files are run under PHP5 (instead of being served as text files
3. Install a copy of MySQL for your account on a specific port number.
4. Create a MySQL database for WordPress
5. Set up a cron job to make sure MySQL comes back up if the server ever restarts
6. Download and unzip the latest version of WordPress
7. Automatically edit your WordPress config file with all the information it has just generated

Credits

The only reason I was able to figure out this process in the first place was because of the following people

• Micro’s guide to MySQL on shell – Not the best instructions in the world, but absolutely necessary.
• Easy PHP on shell – Tristan at the EMU marketing department made most of this possible with his instructions for getting PHP files to run properly (instead of being served as text files). Tristan actually wrote a WordPress installation guide similar to this one last month.
• Justin McCraw – Helped me remember the simplest set of steps to get this done
• Bruce and Spencer at the UO for helping with specific issues I had along the way

The method I explain here gives you access to the MediaWiki API class as opposed to the standard MediaWiki rendering class. Most of this code came from MediaWiki’s api.php which you can find in MediaWiki 1.13.

Here’s what the API output will look like for the Foobar page on Wikipedia (in XML).

I spent quite a bit of time poking around in the MediaWiki /includes directory and trying different hack-ish methods before this page that had exactly what I needed! It did need updating, but I was happy to oblige. I even had this whole post written up using a sloppier approach before finding the FauxRequest class that I explain below.

The code

Let’s start with the sample code, then go over the details.

$mediawiki_root = '/Users/eyeRmonkey/www/mediawiki-test';
putenv("MW_INSTALL_PATH=$mediawiki_root");
// Initialise common code
require ($mediawiki_root . '/includes/WebStart.php');

class MediaWikiAPIWrapper {
	public function make_fake_request($params) {
		$request = new FauxRequest($params, true);

		$api = new ApiMain($request);

		// Process data & use an output buffer to capture the resutls
		$api->execute();
		$result = $api->getResult();
		$data = &$result->getData();

		return $data;
	}
}

Initializing

The first matter of business is lines 1 through 4. These need to be called outside of any function or class. I spent some time trying to figure out why none of MediaWiki’s global variables were showing up in print_r($GLOBALS) before thinking to require_once() it outside of any functions. Duh. Make sure you get the path to your MediaWiki installation root correct (no trailing slash, obviously).

Most of the work get’s done on line 4. This get’s all the code ready for a standard API call from the web. This whole approach is meant to be used by an extension, so we need to play catchup by initializing the core MediaWiki code.

Faking the Request

The good folks at MediaWiki were are kind enough to provide us with a class specifically meant for faking an API request! Joy! It’s called FauxRequest and it extends the WebRequest object that is used by default for API calls. The FauxRequest class takes an array of keys and values that represent what would’ve been passed in the URL.

The API manual has more information on formats and different queries you can make to the API.

Here is what your $params array might look like to grab the Main Page:

$data = array(
		'action' => 'parse',
		'page' => 'Main_Page'
	);

Running the API

Lines 10 through 15 create an instance of the API and pass in our FauxRequest object to get things rolling!

The $data array will hold all of the information that you would get from a format=php API call. As always, you could use print_r() to display the Array for debugging purposes.

That’s it!

mod_rewrite Issues

On my wiki, the .htaccess mod_rewrite rules that I have seem to be preventing the API from functioning totally correctly. A workaround I discovered is to use the following API call: /api.php?action=parse&title=Main_Page&text={{:Main_Page}}. This works by asking the API to translate the text parameter into rendered text. The {{:Main_Page}} says that the text is actually a transclusion-ed page. It’s definitely a hack, but it works on servers with weird rewrite rules for pretty URLs.

Further reading

• API: Query Properties
• API: Expanding templates and rendering – Relevant to the transclusion workaround.

The problem arose when I switched from “ugly permalinks” (http://example.com/?p=N) to “pretty permalinks” (http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name). I already had a .htaccess file in my root directory, but when switching permalink stuctures, WordPress attempts to write it’s own .htaccess file. Since mine was already in place, it failed and I started getting 404 errors on every pages except the home page.

To solve them problem, I simply deleted the .htaccess file I put had in there. Then I switched back to “ugly permalinks” and then switched again to date-based permalinks. This allowed WordPress a change to create it’s own .htacces file with the correct rewrite conditions. I also add my own a couple of my own lines of code to make my site no www compliant. Here is my resulting .htaccess file for my root blog directory:

# BEGIN WordPress
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.eyermonkey.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://eyermonkey.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</ifmodule>

1. END WordPress

Other than that, everything went smoothly. I ended up using a theme called Mandigo with a few images from Orange Crush. I also installed a few plugins:

• Google Sitemap Generator
• Ultimate Google Analytics
• SimpleFlickr
• Gregarious (Social bookmarking – Digg and Reddit)
• and a non-WordPress specific widget for Last.fm

So far, my favorite part of the entire WordPress system is the ability to edit the code of your theme from within the admin panel. Before I discovered that feature, I was manually editing files on my computer, then uploading them to my server. It started to get quite tedious.

My advice to anyone installing WordPress for the first time is to take the time to familiarize yourself with all of the options in the admin panel.