With the Plogger system uploaded to your server, you can now surf to it and begin the configuration. Open a web browser and go to the _install.php page within your Plogger system. In the case of our example site, that means going to:
www.the-web-book.com/plogger/_install.php
You should see a screen like this:
Fill in the connection details for the MySQL database, so that Plogger can access it. The host should be set to localhost unless your hosting company has advised you otherwise. The username and password will normally be the same as you use for logging into your site's hosting control panel. In our examples the database name is thewebbo_cms.
When you’ve finished, click the Install button and Plogger will finish its setup process. Once it has done so, it will create an admin account for you, so that you’ll be able to log in and upload pictures. The admin password is randomly generated and will be displayed on the screen, so make sure you don’t close your browser until you’ve made a note of your admin username and password!
When you’ve made a note of your admin username and password, click the Proceed button. Plogger will then tell you the URLs for browsing your gallery and for logging in as an administrator. These are, in the case of our example site:
www.the-web-book.com/plogger for public access
www.the-web-book.com/plogger/admin for the admin login screen
You may find you also see a few error warning notices displayed at this point. If this happens, check that you can browse and administer the site correctly. Assuming you can, there’s nothing to worry about. If the problems persist, check your hosting company’s online FAQ or support section to see if there’s any reason why these error message might be displayed. Also (and this is a good tip for any similar situation), try typing or pasting the full text or the error message into a search engine such as Google, to find out if anyone else has reported similar problems. Hopefully they’ll also have reported how they solved them.
Uploading Your Pictures
With Plogger now installed on your web server, you’ll need to upload a picture in order to test that it’s working properly. Surf to the admin page, as listed above, and enter your admin username and password when prompted. Y ou may also wish to try entering an incorrect
password, just to make sure that the security is working properly. Performing such a test each time you install any new product on your server is always a good idea.
Once you’re logged in, you’ll see this screen:
Click the Browse button and navigate to an image file on your computer. Add a caption and a description (this is important, as you’ll see later). Then choose which album you want to add your picture to. You’ll probably want to create a new one rather than putting it in the test collection.
When everything’s ready, click the Upload button and wait for the message that says your upload was successful.
When it’s done, log out and surf to the public part of your site rather than the admin section. You should see your gallery displayed. To check that Plogger is correctly storing information in your MySQL database, use the search box. Just type a word or two from the caption or description, and check that Plogger finds your picture.
With everything working properly, you can now proceed to make your site look as you want it to. Log into the admin section again and explore the various features that are available.
Avoiding Data Overload
When you sign up for a web hosting package, your account comes with a certain amount of disk space on the server to store your information. If you’re storing mostly text, you don’t need to worry about hitting your limit. But if you intend to store lots (as in, thousands) of pictures, be aware that they eat server space like nothing else. Especially if they are high- resolution multi-megapixel images, which can typically occupy up 10 MB each.
If you think this might be a problem for you, check the small print of your web hosting package to find out just how much server space you get. Remember, too, that people who view or download your pictures will use up your bandwidth allocation, so you may want to check that as well. For example, if you have a 10 MB picture on your site and 100 people download it, that’s 1 GB of bandwidth traffic from your server.
Equally, if you upload 100 pictures to your gallery, at 10 MB each, that’s 1 GB of traffic from your own broadband connection. Which, if you are paying for a broadband service that only allows you 2 GB a month, is a fairly large chunk. If this is the case, check whether your ISP
allows free uploads overnight that don’t count towards your monthly limit. If so, upload the pictures then, or downsample them (reduce their resolution and thus the size of the files) before uploading them.