OfficeTrio: Installation

Requirements

Your website must have access to the following services:

PHP V4.1.-5.0 - With no disabled functions! (especially mail, fsockopen). Works fine with register globals Off.

A MySQL V4.0+ Database.

You need to have access to your MySQL Database. You'll need to know your database username and password because these must be entered into the scripts.

You need to be able to edit the O3 settings file using a text editor.

You need to be able to upload the scripts to your website. If you're unsure - please read the installation procedure below and decide if you can do it. If you need an FTP tool, see the page on Telnet and FTP.

All pages using O3 features must be have a .php suffix if they are to be processed by the PHP interpreter. This may not be necessary - check with your webhost.

Installation And Setup

Before buying O3, please ensure you can complete this installation procedure:

Download and unzip the scripts onto your PC. I'd create a folder on the desktop... O3 is usually installed into a sub-directory called 'o3' off the main website directory. If you already have a development environment on your PC, you can copy it straight into there.

Your 'Development' & 'Production' Environments

You probably have, on your PC, a 'master' directory where you keep all your websites before uploading them. Did you know you can install an Apache web-server with PHP & MySQL very easily, and this will allow you to have a fully functioning copy of your live website(s) - running on your PC!...

You just need to get the latest version of UniServer (it's free!) and follow the installation instructions (I recommend you install it on your desktop). Once complete, copy your websites into the new 'www' directory. Now you can access the websites running on your PC via the URL: 'http://localhost'.

Just put each of your websites in a subdirectory of this (the 'Document Root' as it's known). You access them via 'http://localhost/directoryname' This will enable you to test changes to your website before you upload them. Very handy if you want to be professional about it!

O3 is designed to be optionally installed in two places: a development machine - i.e. your PC, and a production machine - i.e. your webserver. As discussed in the installation notes, it's possible to setup different URLs and database login details for the 'local' and 'remote' machines, and O3 automatically senses where it's running and uses the appropriate ones.

Define Your Settings. There are few settings in the file 'o3start.php' - they are fully explained in the file itself. Here's a list:

Website Name
Website Description
Website EMail Address
Website & O3 URLs
O3 Path
Database Connect Details

The first time you use O3 we recommend you install the full demo website so you can get used to how it works. You can use it as the basis for your first O3 website. Once you know O3, you can copy just the o3/ directory into your websites.

Upload all the files to the location you want to use. The installation contains an exact copy of the demo website - so you can install it directly into the document root - if there's nothing else there - or a sub-directory if there is.

Build The Database. Go to http://yourdomain.com/rebuild-o3-db.php in your browser. You can also get to this script from the main O3 'Index' page (o3-index.php). You can choose to build the database with the demo data that's on this demo, or without it. Just choose the appropriate link from the O3 Index page.

Login - go to the login page (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/login.php via the 'Index' page (o3-http://yourdomain.com/index.php), or click on any of the protected pages and they'll redirect you.
The default login is user: admin , password: admin

Setup Your Categories (Optional). You can create new categories, and update and delete, copy and move existing ones easily using the Categories-Manager.

Setup Your Baseline Sales-Period. Define a sales-period called 'Baseline' in the Sales-Periods Manager which covers the whole time you anticipate trading - i.e. from now until 20 years in the future (you can change this later!). All the products you create initially should be created against this baseline period (they will automatically if it exists) so you can then define sales-periods where the price and other details change..

Setup Your Products. You can create new products, and update and delete existing ones easily using the Products-Manager. To create membership products, they should contain a certain string in the product name - ('Membership' by default). See the manual for more info.

Enable O3 Functions. Include the following code at the top of all pages you want to use O3 functionality in, including: pages your affiliates refer people to, access to user details, buy buttons etc! (assumes installation dir. is 'o3'). If in doubt add this to the top of all your webpages!:
<? require_once 'o3/o3start.php'; ?>

...And put this at the bottom of all those pages, just before the closing body tag (</body>):
<? require_once 'o3/o3stop.php'; ?>

Setup Your Catalog Page. Add your tempate to the example catalog page 'catalog.php' that comes with O3. See the Catalog page in the user manual for more infomation:

Change The Default Admin Login. For security, you should change the default admin login. You should enter your own email address here. (It won't let you update the 'admin' user because it's not a valid email address.):

Optional Activities

Creating Custom Product / Category etc. Pages

Create Your Pages. You can create your own pages which display particular things in detail, or lists of things matching a set of criteria. Refer to the Functions manual page for a list of the functions you can use. You can also use the code in the catalog page as an example.

Ensure youp pages include o3start & o3stop & also echo the o3msg variable above any content. I.e:
<? echo $o3msg; ?>

Affiliates

Setup Your Banners. If you will have affiliates, you need to set up the links they'll use to advertise you. This is done in the Banners page. Banners can be any val

Add Tracking Code. You must ensure the O3 Startup script is included at the very top of all pages your affiliates will direct prospects to (i.e. your home page). Add this code before ANY HTML, comments, spaces, ANYTHING! This is the code that tracks the affiliate hits and cookies the prospect with the affiliate's ID.
<? require_once 'rt.php'; ?>

Protecting Pages

Protect Restricted Pages. O3 ALWAYS authenticates your visitors, it's part of the o3start.php script. If an access level's not defined for a page, it defaults to '0' which means anyone can access it. To protect pages, you just have to specify a higher access level than 0 for it at the very top of the page, before the o3start.php script. (See below: ACCESS-LEVEL is an integer number from 0 upwards).

Once this code is in your pages - only logged in users with a sufficiently high access level will be shown the page, all others will be re-directed to the login page:

<?

$level=ACCESS-LEVEL;

require_once '03/o3start.php';

?>

Search

Setup a search page, and add a site search form to your website. See the search page in the manual. for more details.

Customising

Customise the O3 Login and other pages' headers. You can add your own header easily just by replacing the code include 'o3-logo.php'; with your own header. You could even just put your own header into this file.

Create some custom product 'containers'. You can change how products are displayed by O3's Product-Wizard by defining the HTML they're displayed in. Use the examples as a starting point, or build your own.

Customise the code if you want. You are free to change the code as much as you want.

Optional - Miscellaneous

DomainsAide Integration Optional: If you want to integrate this with Domains Aide then replace the existing domainsaide/register/template/pay.template with the one provided, AND set the value of $passthru in settings.php to 'os0'
You must also uncomment the code marked 'domainsaide' in the ipn scripts you use.)

Installation