Getting Started

This documentation describes how to get started with SocialEngine 4.

Requirements

Minimum

• Apache-based shared web server
• MySQL 4.1
• PHP 5.12
• PHP safe mode: OFF
• PHP extensions: gd2, curl
• PHP memory limit: 32M+
• Sendmail

Recommended

• Apache-based VPS or dedicated web server
• PHP 5.26 or newer
• MySQL 5.0 or newer
• crontab

Optional

• memcached (speed boost)
• PHP extensions: apc (speed boost), bcmath (speed boost), json (speed boost), mbstring (required for non-English support)
• mod_rewrite (for SEO-friendly URLs)

Optional Requirements for Video Plugin

• ffmpeg (for encoding video) - without ffmpeg, users can still post YouTube and Vimeo videos.

Optional Requirements for Chat Plugin

• VPS or dedicated server - budget/shared servers may not handle a high volume of users chatting at the same time

How do I check if my host is compatible with SocialEngine4?

Most modern hosting providers are compatible with SocialEngine4 but
if in doubt you can contact them directly and refer them to this page.

Installation and Updating Instructions

Installation Instructions

1. In order to install SocialEngine4, you need four pieces of
   information. If you do not know what they are, please contact your
   hosting provider and ask them.
   
   • MySQL Server Address (often "localhost", "127.0.0.1", or the server IP address)
   • MySQL Database Name
   • MySQL Username
   • MySQL Password
   
   
2. Download the SocialEngine4 ZIP file and extract it to your computer.
3. Upload all of the files to your hosting account (it can exist either in the root HTML directory, or a subdirectory).
   
   • If you are using a Unix server (or Unix variant, like Linux, OS X,
     FreeBSD, etc.) you must set the permissions (CHMOD) of the following
     directories and files to 777:
     
     • /temporary/ (recursively; all directories and files contained within this must also be changed)
     • /public/ (recursively; all directories and files contained within this must also be changed)
     • /application/themes/ (recursively; all directories and files contained within this should also be changed)
     • /application/languages/ (recursively; all directories and files contained within this must also be changed)
     • /application/settings/ (recursively; all files contained within this must also be changed)
     
     
   
   
4. Access the SocialEngine installer by accessing your website; the installer wizard will automatically begin.
5. Upload all the files to a hosting account. These files should be uploaded to a web-accessible directory.

Upgrading Instructions

For our initial beta release, we will not be providing upgrade instructions.

Module Installation

• Download and extract each of the plugin ZIP files you wish to install.
• Upload all the files to the base path of SocialEngine.
• Log into your SocialEngine site, access the admin area, then go to the Manage > Plugins page.
• Click the "Install" link for each plugin you wish to install.

Getting Started with SocialEngine4

User Access

Member and Admin accounts are unified in SocialEngine, so that you
as the site owner can use the same username and password to access the
website. A user account with super-admin privileged is created for you
during the installation process. Additional user accounts can be
created via the signup process, and specific privileges can be assigned
by you, the admin, after the account has been created.

Developers Guide

Tools

• Netbeans IDE ( http://netbeans.org/features/php/ )
• Set SocialEngine4 to be in "Development" mode (see Admin > Settings > General Settings). This prevents the use of caching, while also enables error messages to be displayed to the front-end interface.

Structure

SocialEngine4 is based on the Zend Framework, and is built in an MVC
(Model-View-Controller) structure. It is also built with modularity in
mind.

• /application/
  
  This directory contains the majority of SocialEngine files.
  
  • /application/languages/
    
    See the section below on Languages
  • /application/libraries/
    
    Third party PHP libraries are typically contained in here. For example,
    Zend Framework and CSS Scaffold both live in this directory, as does
    our extensions to Zend Framework (called Engine).
  • /application/modules/
    
    See the section below on Modules
  • /application/settings/
    
    These files contain configurations that typically will not be modified
    after your initial installation. Things like your database
    username/password, cache settings, mail settings, etc are stored in
    here.
  • /application/themes/
    
    See the section below on Themes
  
  
• /development/
  
  Various tools that we have used during development are contained in this
  directory. You can mostly ignore this hodge-podge of files.
• /externals/
  
  Most of our images, javascript libraries, and flash applications that
  are used globally are retained in this directory. These should contain
  trusted (i.e. not user-uploaded) content.
• /public/
  
  User-uploaded content is always contained in here. This directory
  should be both web-accessible and writable by the web server (chmod 777
  recursively).
• /temporary/
  
  Various temporary files, such as cache files, logs, session files, etc
  are stored in this directory. It should not be web-accessible, but must
  be writable by the web server (chmod 777 recursively). We provide an
  ".htaccess" file to block access to this directory from the web browser,
  but if you are using a web server other than Apache, we recommend you
  configure the web server accordingly to prevent view access.

Modules

/application/modules/*

Most of SocialEngine's functionality resides here. Each module
contains within it the MVC structure, where the "Model", "views", and
"controllers" directories correspond to the MVC paths. Please see our
included skeleton module "HelloWorld" for more information on this.

Languages

/application/languages/*

Each language gets its own two-letter (or 5-character with
localization support) directory in this sub-directory. The language
files are in multiple CSV files, though they are concatenated into one
large CSV file (in no particular order, except that "custom.csv" is the
last). One important point to keep in mind is that duplicate keys
override previously defined keys. So, for example, if you have a key
"Turtles are fast!" in both core.csv and custom.csv, since custom.csv is
loaded last, the value set to "Turtles run fast!" in custom.csv will be
the one used.

• Each line has at minimum two columns, and can contain more for different pluralizations.
• Each column is separated using a semi-colon, and is enclosed in
  "double-quotes" if it contains any sort of white-space (we recommend
  wrapping your values in quotes in all cases just to be safe).
• The first column is always going to be the key. This is the English word or phrase that exists in the view script, controller, or other portion of the code.
• The second column is always going to be the default translation of the key.
• If there is an subsequent columns after the second column, it will be for various pluralizations of the key.
• Untranslated variables can be contained within a translation key and translations. Variable replacement is done using the PHP function sprintf
  , and so the same rules apply. When only one variable is being
  injected into a translation, typically "%s" is the placeholder for that
  variable. If multiple variables are being injected, you can use "%1$s",
  "%2$s", "%3$s" etc to put the variables in their proper positions for
  your translation.
• If your translation has double-quotes in it, you must use two
  double-quotes. So as an example, the sentence 'He said "wow".' would
  appear in a CSV files as:
  
  "He said ""wow"".";"He said ""wow""."

Themes

/application/themes/*

We utilize a framework called "CSS Scaffold" which makes editing
your community's theme a simple process. Each theme is stored in its own
directory within /applications/themes/. A default theme is
automatically loaded when you first install SocialEngine. Each theme
contains two files: constants.css and theme.css.

At the top of constants.css, you'll find a series of global CSS
settings (called "constants"). You can edit these to adjust the colors,
fonts, and other styles throughout your entire community.

The other file, theme.css, contains more specific styles that are
used throughout your community. Many of these styles inherit values from
constants.css. If you want to override any of the default styles on
your community, you can edit them here. If they aren't present in
theme.css (and are being loaded from outside the theme itself), you can
override them by adding new styles to the bottom of theme.css.