Marco Steinhäuser

Awesome, awesome, awesome

I never expected 35 (!) people bringing together after this very short-term announcement, I was really surprised! Obviously, most attendees did not even see the direct announcement but heard it somehow as a rumor from their friends: “Did you hear about that Open Source Meeting? I cannot go but you ought to… “. And this is how it actually shall work. Hey, Leipzig was over the Munich line of “Attendees of the first OSS meeting”!

Although the aim of this kind of meetings is to bring users together with the “makers” of open source, of course, mostly the enthusiasts took part this (first) time. Another aim is the comprehensive exchange of experiences over the different projects. Interestingly, there was no convention like this before. However, we happily welcomed Linux users, system administrators, guys attending the Open Street Map (OSM) project, a hand full of freelancers and developers of the zope project.

The talks were pretty interesting and full of requests: Carsten spoke about the Mozilla project, Kai about working with DTP applications on Linux, Florian about OpenOffice.org (told us some secrets ) and Volkmar about the OSM project. Of course, in conventions like that the requests go like: What is your business model?, Where do you get your salary from?, What does the project do with your committed data? Interesting enough, isn’t it? The atmosphere thankfully was very laid back.

We thank Jan from GET AG for attending and sponsoring the rides of the long-distance attendees, also MaFi for the canvas an Henrik (yasni.com) for the projector. Not to forget Karsten (SPIZZ) for the location, the Internet connection and the nearby bar.

As we agreed, the next Open Source Meeting Leipzig will take place in about quarter a year (Feb?). And yes, you are allowed to bring your proprietary friends then

See more pictures of the event here:
http://picasaweb.google.de/floeff/OpenSourceTreffenAm23November2009InLeipzig
http://picasaweb.google.com/carstenbook/OpensourcetreffenLeipzig231109?feat=directlink#

Again and again I see my website being found with the key word “rewritebase oxid eshop”. Obviously this seems not to be a clear case. Let me explain it:

The OXID eShop strictly uses so called re-written URLs, known as “permalinks” in WordPress. In opposite to e.g. Wordpress, you cannot choose between “regular” URLs and re-written URLs, it’s use is assumed and this, absolutely makes sense: Who wants to run an online store without wanting to be ranked on top of the known search engines?

An example:

• Until OXID eShop Version 4, URLs where build like this:

  http://www.yourshop.com/oxid.php/sid/f1abc0556fc27ad9a023d453793edfd8/cl/details/anid/29b49c9e2db7bc7c7.33407713/Genelec-8020/

• Now, this URL (built up by the program code) by default is re-written to another URL this style:

  http://www.yourshop.com/category/product.html

Nice, isn’t it? In a matter of fact, your product details page will rank much higher in any search engine!

To achieve this effect, your webspace or server has to fulfill some requirements before you can set up OXID eShop:

1. The component “mod_rewrite” has to be installed. You can check this easily with a simple file – let’s call it “check.php” – that you can load onto your server via FTP contents the following: <?php phpinfo(); ?>. Fire up your browser and insert http://www.yourstore.com/check.php now, search for “mod_rewrite”. If you cannot find anything, turn to your hosting provider. Don’t forget to ditch this file once you saw it – the information provided opens doors to all the hackers.
2. Check, if you really uploaded the delivered file .htaccess. Files with a leading dot are marked as hidden in the Unix world, so at a MAC, and will not be uploaded by default.
3. Some hosting providers do not allow an own .htaccess file. Request it!
4. Some hosting providers request an additional entry into the .htaccess file, called “RewriteBase”

In this case, replace

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

by

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine On

or use

RewriteBase /oxid/

if you run a sub-folder.

If there still problems remaining, turn to the forums, I’ll be there
http://www.oxid-esales.com/forum/

On November 23th at 7 PM the First Open Source Meeting in Leipzig will take place in the cellar of Cafe SPIZZ. Florian Effenberger from OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. and Carsten Book from Mozilla Corporation will attend and speak about their projects. This evening will be held in a similar style to Webmondays.

Many thousand programmers in the world code free software in their spare time or supported by their companies. They follow the principle of Richard Stallmann, who proclaimed already in the early 60th that program code is nothing else than thoughts and thoughts are free. From this, the GNU project evolved that produced the first open source applications. The most prominent examples are the operating system Linux as well as the Mozilla project with the Firefox browser or the office suite OpenOffice.org.

Today, open source software is stable, secure and functional. More and more public and private organizations in many countries are keen using it. Also the European Union as well as several German Federal Ministries support the usage of open source software and thus boost the competition between the software producers.

Hashtag for Twitter: #osstreffen
Wiki: http://ostle.musterdenker.de/
XING: https://www.xing.com/events/opensourcetreffen-leipzig-431162
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#/event.php?eid=184149739903

Of course, you have to announce your new blog posts over Twitter. A cool twitter client is not the worst idea – I personally decided to run Twhirl for this purpose because Twhirl is able to run multiple accounts.
As Twhirl is based on the platform Adobe Air, you first have to install this one.

1. Go to http://get.adobe.com/air/, download it to your /home/ folder.
2. Open the command line and type chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
3. Type chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
4. The Adobe Air installer will open up now in a new window. You will have to confirm the terms and conditions.

Time to install Twhirl:

1. Go to http://www.twhirl.org/ and click to the install button on the right hand side.
2. Again, an install routine opens up (inside Adobe Air). Choose your options for the Twhirl installation here.
3. A twhirl instance now should pop up. Enter your Twitter name(s) and your password here and you are done.

If you are in business, your companies’ IT policy is perhaps to run Microsoft products like Windows OS only. Although you might have a bit of freedom in this manner (let’s say because you are presenting on Open Source software fairs and need to run a Linux for this case) the switch might be not that easy thinking about Microsoft Exchange, Skype, VPN, Microsoft Office and so on. For me, it is really fun working on Linux and I would like to switch over completely as soon as possible. That’s why I ran Kubuntu as a parallel operating system.

Somehow, I got rid of running KDE on my Ubuntu installation and so I decided to install the Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) on a Gnome basis and I was really surprised about it’s simple handling. By the way: Gnome was suspect to me all the times I tried it before. Today I believe it was only about a simple and stupid marketing effect: I didn’t like the combination of brown, purple and orange on the desktop…

So now, let’s beginn with the Skype installation.
As you might know, Skype is proprietary software but obviously everybody in IT uses it. Nevertheless, the installation on Ubuntu is possible even including the update services. First of all you have to implement the Medibuntu sources to your sources.list file running this command on the terminal:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list \
--output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list &&
sudo apt-get -q update &&
sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring &&
sudo apt-get -q update


As a next step, install the Skype application:

sudo aptitude install skype


Despite Skype is only provided with version 2.1 on Linux, you are done mate! Somehow you will be connected to your colleagues, friends, etc. in this first step. More to follow.

After my one-week-trip to Barcelona (maybe another blogpost will follow about it) I will go to Freiburg next week, gladly taking part in OXID’s Partner Day 2009 on October, 27th. As usual, a lot of OXID partners will come presenting themselves, discussing about OXID eSales news and attending the so called “Best Solution Award”, an award for the best shopping cart software implementation split up into different categories like design or technical implementation.

Actually, the most valuable events will happen between the talks: Getting in touch with the guys implementing OXID shops day by day and face to face with the clients, will bring more insights during the coffee breaks and in the smoking corners. As I feel that some of our (esp. old-established) partners did not get the Open Source strategy yet I, as the community dude, hope to can bring over this spirit mostly in personal conversations.

Looking forward to see all that mates I know mostly from telephone or Skype conversations, especially our foreign partners to come from Czech Republic, Lithuania, Saudi-Arabia and India.

Alright, you’re not registered yet? Here we go [German]:
http://www.oxid-esales.com/de/partner/partnerworld/anmeldung-oxid-partnertag

Moving WordPress from one server to another is pretty simple. It actually shall not take longer as five minutes following this steps:

1st step – server environment

Check if the basic server environment is the same as you had on the server before, especially for

• PHP-Version (some modules require PHP5 and higher)
• Database-Version (maybe important for your data import)
• special PHP modules (e.g. if you use permalinks, make sure mod_rewrite is activated and running)

If you feel like there is everything alright on the new server, you may want to go ahead.

2nd step – the database

• Export the WordPress database of your former server to a sql-file or to a compressed sql-file. You may either use a GUI tool like phpMyAdmin or the terminal.
• Import this (compressed) sql-file into the database on your server. Use the import function of your GUI tool to do so or the terminal if you are able to login with putty.
• Change the path settings: In the new database of your webserver, you shall find a table called wp-options. In option_id="2", option_name="siteurl" you will find the path settings you entered during the initial installation process

3rd step – the files

• Connect to your previous server via FTP and download the files of your WordPress document root.
• Upload this files to you new server.
• Using your FTP client, go to the new server’s WordPress document root and open the file wp-config.php. Adapt the new server’s database name, the database server (if needed, localhost is used mostly), the database user name and the database password.
• Check the permissions needed for proper work of your new system:
  - wp-config.php has to be set to 0644
  - for pucture uploads etc, /wp-content/uploads/ shall be writable (0755 or 0777)
  - for updates or automatic plugin installation, /wp-content/plugins/ and /wp-content/upgrades/ shall be writable (0755 or 0777)
• Take care: In Unix-World, e.g. if you are using any Linux or Mac (AFAIK with a FreeBSD under the hood), dotted files are not shown and not copied by default using your FTP client. So the .htaccess file which is important if you activated the so called “Permalinks” may be not transferred. Make sure it is on his place.
• Go to Admin -> Settings -> Permalinks. In case you activated this options, at the bottom of this page the current content of your .htaccess appears like it should be. Probably the value for your RewriteBase changed. Copy this content and overwrite the .htaccess on your server.

You are done! Congratulations hero!