Extra Topics (Joe's Blog Site)

Elgg is an open-source social networking platform. I was installing it lately when I encountered this error. I thought there was an error in the installation script because there’s a folder named “actions” not “action” as indicated in the error message. I even tried renaming that folder to remove the “s” but I got a ‘Call to undefined function‘ error. I checked my PHP version and its 5.2.6. I realized it has something to do with the directory access.

Solution
Read the INSTALL.TXT included in the root folder of your installation. It says:

A note on settings and .htaccess

The Elgg installer will try (yeah try harder!) and create two files for you:

* engine/settings.php, which contains the database settings for your installation
* .htaccess, which allows Elgg to generate dynamic URLs

If these files can’t be automatically generated, for example because you don’t have the correct directory permissions, Elgg will tell you how to create them. If, for some reason, this won’t work (Yup, this didn’t work alright!), you will need to:

* Copy engine/settings.example.php to engine/settings.php, open it up in a text editor and fill in your database details
* Copy /htaccess_dist to /.htaccess

That’s it, simply copy or rename htaccess_dist to .htaccess and it will work. My advice to all of you reading this article, next time read the installation manual first. And that includes me, darn!

Oh yah, after doing this, try to restart the installation by going into your site again. Elgg’s installer is NOT very user-friendly.

I recently tried to install VirtueMart 1.1.2 complete package to a Joomla 1.0.15 website. I unpacked the files and tried to install the 2MB (approx.) component, then bang! I got this error “Failed to move uploaded file to /media directory”. I tried changing the /media folder’s permission to 777 but it didn’t work.

So I searched the internet for other solutions. They said we could try changing the maximum upload size parameter in PHP but it didn’t work for them so I didn’t try it.

In the end, I realized that I should have checked the VirtueMart manual in the first place. I found an alternative installation procedure in the manual, tried it, and presto, it worked!

In the manual under section 2.2.4 Automatic Installation, it says:

Alternative: You can unpack the contents of ‘com_virtuemart_1.1.x.zip‘ and upload those files to a directory in your Joomla! site (e.g /media or /tmp) using an FTP client. After you’ve done that, specify the directory on the server from where you want to install the files and click ‘Install‘.

Now this part is usually overlooked. And the last sencence in the procedure is not clearly explained. So check out the procedure below on how to do these.

Unpack the contents of ‘com_virtuemat_1.1.x.zip’
Upload the files to /media or /tmp folder using your FTP client.
At your Administrator-> Installers->Components page, specify the direct location of the /media or /tmp folder (depends on where you uploaded) in the “Install directory:” field, as shown in the graphic below. The <user> keyword is the user account. A complete path is already specified there, you’d just have to edit the last part.
Click Install and you’re finished.