sifbuilder

A good friend got curious about sifbuilder. Must be the attaction of the unknown. Graduated in Physics as he is, I told him that using sifbuilder to generate an operational web site was obvious. It was a surprise when he came back and asked me to demonstrate that it was obvious. And, to start with, he wanted to know why PHP was required. Of course the explanation for such a reaction is that he directly moved from a very successful career as COBOL programmer to an even more successful one as j2ee project manager. Demonstration by implementation should suffice.

xampp is a reasonable option to get everything necessary to make sifbuilder work and build web sites with different open web content management cores. In the most frequent case of a linbox this page seems a useful infosource. Let's suppose however a winbox for the sake of dealing with the exceptions first.

Download the distribution from the apachefriends site. for the method, the builder erased the complete existing programming environment and downloaded the XAMPP Windows 1.6.2 zip file.

Choosing a random location, the builder downloaded it to D:\ALL\sifbuilder_local and seven zipped it to here generating D:\ALL\sifbuilder_local\xampp. Let's call it $xampplocation. then, he cdded to $xampplocation and dos ran setup_xampp.bat.

Since the builder wanted to have php.exe directly available on the command line, he added $xampplocation\php to My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Environment->path and rebooted. This set the PHP programming enviroment. Configuration was tested with > php -v.

The builder wanted to maintain the d:/webroot/htdocs document root as it appears in the already vast bibliography on sifbuilder. Thus, he moved $xampplocation/htdocs to d:/webroot/htdocs and replaced $xampplocation\htdocs by d:/webroot/htdocs in files in $xampplocation. Changes were $xampplocation\apache\conf\httpd.conf (2 times), $xampplocation\apache\conf\extra\httpd-ssl.conf (1 time), $xampplocation\apache\conf\extra\httpd-xampp.conf (5 times) and it seems to work to set the apache web server environment.

The mysql database server root password is set with $xampplocation\mysql\bin\mysqladmin -u root password pwd_root. There is a possibility that if a root password is used other than the one in the example the installation procedure fails. But, if the same one is used the whole system will surely fail.

It should now be possible to download sifbuilder and run it to create a postnuke, xoops, drupal or joomla site.