Make installation a positive experience

Developers work hard to make elgg a good community software. So I want to contribute an idea from the user and administrator point of view:

Installation has many checks to prevent problems and security issues. So it demands the data directory being outside the installation tree.
What can an admin of a server do, where all virtual hosts have their own program and data space in a closed tree with data being secured by an apache directive? The only solution is to hack the installation code of elgg. Not really a helpful way.

I propose: Keep the checks but let the (knowledgeable) installer override warnings.

One more example: Requesting world write access to the data directory. For security reasons I am not allowd to give word read access to it. Again I have to devise extra steps to work around it.

(By the way: tikiwiki or moodle have  installtion scripts  that are a breeze)

  • Elgg does not need world read access to the data directory. It needs only user read/write/execute where the user account is the one running the web server. It looks like whoever wrote INSTALL.txt made them as general as possible since a lot of people who install Elgg don't understand permissions.

     

Feedback and Planning

Feedback and Planning

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