Newbie question
Amy Herman
question: The small college I work for has just installed Omeka on a
server that is located in our IT department. I am on the other side
of campus and will be the designated administrator responsible for
helping our faculty use Omeka. I don’t have access to the server
files. Our IT dept will take care of upgrades and backups but they
don’t really have time to do lots of customizations for multiple
users.
Once we start offering Omeka to faculty this fall, I am guessing there
will be requests for customizations. I am hoping to start learning
some basic php so I can help with these requests. I was wondering if
there’s a there a way to set up a replica of our site locally so that
I can test out code changes and not break the main site. In other
words, I’d like to be able to make changes from my office and then
send these requests over to the folks in IT to check before it goes
live. How would I set something like this up? Can I use a desktop
computer?
Many thanks in advance for your help.
Wayne Graham
We develop on our local machines using virtual servers (see
http://www.scholarslab.org/announcements/omeka-development-with-vagrant/...be
sure to update the latest versions of Omeka). Depending on the type of
changes you're anticipating (I'm assuming most of the changes you'll
be making will be theme related, adding plugins), this could be one
solution for you.
One of the more difficult things to do is to manage different
environment; I would highly recommend that you set up a local testing
environment (using vagrant or otherwise), a staging environment for
faculty/it staff to review your changes, and a production environment
for the rest of the world to see (the last two can be on the same
machine, just use different virtualhosts). In our environment, we use
a set of capistrano scripts
(https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano), but you could also use
rsync, scp, or a host of other tools to push your changes to different
servers.
HTH,
Wayne
/**
* @author Wayne Graham
* @link http://www.liquidfoot.com
*/
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Omeka Dev" group.
> To post to this group, send email to omek...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to omeka-dev+...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/omeka-dev?hl=en.
>
bailey
I recently had to do this for the first time as well. I have a Mac, so
I set up MAMP (http://www.mamp.info/) on my computer. You can set up
MAMP without the program, but I think it's the simplest way to get
your personal webserver up and running.
After you set up MAMP (or LAMP for Linux or WAMP, I think, for
Windows), you can run Omeka locally. Just create a database, which you
can do through MAMP by launching phpMyAdmin. Then, place Omeka in your
Sites folder (or any other disk location you specify in MAMP),
navigate to your Omeka local host site in your browser, and install
Omeka just like you normally would.
Cheers,
Bailey
> We develop on our local machines using virtual servers (seehttp://www.scholarslab.org/announcements/omeka-development-with-vagra...
> changes you're anticipating (I'm assuming most of the changes you'll
> be making will be theme related, adding plugins), this could be one
> solution for you.
>
> One of the more difficult things to do is to manage different
> environment; I would highly recommend that you set up a local testing
> environment (using vagrant or otherwise), a staging environment for
> faculty/it staff to review your changes, and a production environment
> for the rest of the world to see (the last two can be on the same
> machine, just use different virtualhosts). In our environment, we use
> a set of capistrano scripts
> (https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano), but you could also use
> rsync, scp, or a host of other tools to push your changes to different
> servers.
>
> HTH,
> Wayne
>
> /**
> * @author Wayne Graham