Yesterday, I managed to install OpenGuides to my perlmonk.org account with some encouragement from Kake and co at #openguides. (My first time on IRC...)

A couple of points:

* If not installing as root, look at perldoc CPAN, FAQ section 5 for the various o conf settings.

** >Before< running perl -MCPAN -e shell, create the ~/perl/lib directory and add it to PERL5LIB ('export PERL5LIB=/home/osfameron/perl/lib')

* CPAN didn't follow install link to Geography::NationalGrid, though it is in the YAML file. May just be me, all the other modules installed fine though.

* I found it annoying that OpenGuides asks for all the config information before completing the install including prerequisites. Because I kept on fscking things up, I re-entered this information a dozen times. (It doesn't save the config file until successul installation).

* For unix-illiterates like me, it'd be nice to know what permissions need to be set on the files created so that the webserver can read them. I just used chmod 0777 on everything to get it to work, but I'm guessing that I could probably be a bit tighter...

* When I first installed at home, I installed CGI::Wiki, so my database got set up during make test (and handily populated with some London pages!) It was already installed on perlmonk.org so I never got that. Kake pointed me at cgi-wiki-setupdb, which /is/ mentioned in OpenGuides's INSTALL file. Would be nice if the Build procedure also finished with a note "please run cgi-wiki-setupdb". (Or prompts whether you want to autorun it? After all, it knows all the details of the db you are using).

** How about an openguides-setupdb script that adds canned "Text formatting rules" etc. entries? (Of course you can't impose a "site policy" document, but the template could include links to discussion on what to include in such a policy).

* Because I installed files in a personal ~/perl/lib, the .cgi couldn't find them. I got around this by editing wiki.cgi with the appropriate use lib invocation.

** (Of course, I forgot to edit the other .cgi scripts in the directory, but there you go). Is there a better way to handle this?

Oh, the empty shell is at http://osfameron.perlmonk.org/cgi-bin/openguides/wiki.cgi (though the add/edit etc. scripts aren't working as above) and may well become less empty over the next months.

I'm really looking forward to playing with OpenGuides! I'll let you know if anything useful comes out of this installation.

Cheers, osfameron