Answered Installation: failed to find install file Modx Revo 2.6.4

Trying a fresh install of Modx Revo 2.6.4 I downloaded the zip file from modx.com, unzipped it to a directory and used filezilla to copy the unzipped files to my site. It's under https://my-domain.com/www/modx Note that I bought a certificate, thus using https. Also my hosting co uses "www" in the dir structure instead of public_html or similar.

Under here I have the directories
connectors
core
manager
setup

& the files
---------------
config.core.php
ht.access
index.php
all with 755 permissions

I set my website to redirect www.my-domain.com => my-domain.com and I disabled the use of .htaccess files. I plan to do an advanced installation or at least one where I rename the core and manager and connectors directories. I made director listings viewable in my website control panel.

However going to the path for core simply shows a 404 error instead of loading some sort of setup routine to install.
Also I previously had Modx 2.5.7 working [poorly] on my site but I completely erased it. Hence I should meet the system requirements.

Ah here let me conceive of it this way: the www folder is the part of your site that *potentially will be served up to the public. The other stuff is your personal nuts and bolts, the engine of the site, behind closed doors, for safety. None of that stuff is supposed to ever be seen or accessible to anyone outside.

Now of course not everything in www is public, but anything public is coming out of that folder.

All the contents that are going out of www folder are your "my-domain.com", so there is always a "public" folder of some name, and its always hidden from the site url because there is no need. It is in some sense the site itself, the name is for your convenience as a developer and for the safety issue

I think I got it this time

Hi & Thanks everyone.

The setup seems to work -- note that I'm doing the advanced setup using the file modx-2.6.4-pl-advanced.zip I've moved the core above my public_html or in my case www directory. I do have one problem and that's setting up the sql database: MariaDB v5.5.59 However, I really don't know much php programming and my ISP doesn't have cpanel.

I can create the database but the modx setup gives errors connecting to it.

Connecting to database server:
Could not connect to the database server. Check the connection properties and try again.

[2018-06-29 14:18:22] (ERROR in xPDOConnection::connect @ /xd3/homes/hash/38/23/a12338/81/30/u113081/my-domain.com/core/xpdo/xpdo.class.php : 3119) SQLSTATE[HY000] [2019] Can't initialize character set (path: /xd1/pkg/mysql55/share/charsets/)

Note: this is the correct path to the core -- I put it above the www.
Now if I connect to my old database I get an error: modx_ Table prefix already in use. So I don't want to carry the data for an old website: I thought I'd start with a new database.

Installation Summary
Core installation was successful. Click next to complete the installation process.
(scroll to bottom)

Toggle Success Messages | Toggle Warnings

I moved one of the 2 setup directories to above my www for security -- recommended in the config guide. While I remembered to set the path during config, I forgot to go thru and set the moved directory permissions to 755 (actually I used 775). Once I did this and refreshed everything, it worked!

Sorry for the confusion. [ed. note: julius nepos last edited this post 5 years, 9 months ago.]

You fixed it at this point? Changing the permissions did it?

At this point you are a cagey vet already! Changing permissions on the server, advanced site setup, the works! Excellent progress~!

[ed. note: nuan88 last edited this post 5 years, 9 months ago.]

Quote from: nuan88 at Jun 29, 2018, 08:51 PM

You fixed it at this point?

Appears so, now I can return to the subject of my original posts of a month ago and work on the menus (actually Navigation Bars) and templates.

For your help I should provide a brief history of the site and web consultants.

The site: coinsandhistory was originally done all by me in html using in-line css. I never knew how to make a style sheet. The purpose was to show how coins, dating back to the mid 7th century BC, can show the history of countries, empires, important people, ect. Over time the site grew to maybe 200 - 300 pages, however, SE (search engine) results consistantly placed it at the absolute bottom of 40,000 sites mentioning the topic. Now I believe the reason is that the site carried hundreds if not thousands of very hi res photos with long download times. None of the consultants I hired mentioned this would affect SE results despite specializing in SEO.

Thinking that the html was the problem, I hired one of the top Word Press experts to fix it. After a year he got the main page in WP but all the other pages remained in html. He did try to instruct me on WP design. Attempting to put the other pages into WP I ran into "plugin problems". After paying plugin developers to try to write what I felt were absolutely essential features for handling coin images I strayed out of WP's sweet spot of simple websites. Also despite security, WP sites get hacked due to poor control of the numerous plugins needed. Thus I took the site off-line.

A new developer, hired last year, responded to my Word Press ad by suggesting Modx. She was supposed to get it into modx and teach me to maintain it. She did get the one main page into modx but couldn't get any menus to work. Then she abruptly dropped the project and I was able to negotiate for a return of almost all the money paid for work pending. She didn't teach me anything about maintaining it and looking at the site it was an impossible hash of files.

Thus I figured I could use her hash job and if I could get the menus to work, then I'd tolerate her structure and just link to all the pages. Eventually I got fustrated with hundred line chunks and snippets that apparently did nothing and found it easier to redo the site in my own fashion. I also purchased an SSL certificate. [ed. note: julius nepos last edited this post 5 years, 9 months ago.]

Hey Julius:

Yes, you mentioned a bit about the difficulties you experienced. Its always a struggle I think, but it does seem like you have had an extraordinary difficult time of it. The good news is Modx is very good at helping your SEO, and for pictures you are going to want to use good file names and maybe later some tags.

Let me ask about the html files with inline css, the files are still available? The question is, do those html files have things like the header and footer in them, or just the contents of one page.

The way it usually works with Modx and its the normal way generally, is the stuff like the site header and footer and so on, usually including the top navigation bar, are put into the template, this is better because if you want to change the footer, you can change it in one place, rather than going through every file and making the changes again and again. I remember in the old days that's what they would have to do, go through each page to change things.

When we do it this way, you will use a code like this [[*contents]] in the template, and that is the place where the template will pull that resource's contents into the page. If I have a resource that has one sentence, 'nuan is cool', but do not have the [[*contents]] in the template, that sentence will not be in the page, we would only see the stuff in the template itself.

Now if the page is unique, then it can all be in the template, a resource is still needed but it can be blank. I also think the opposite can work, with a template with only [[*contents]] in it, nothing else, and all of the <head> content and everything else in the resource. So that's the flexible relationship between template and resource (page) contents, and its just according to your needs. The [[$chunk]] code you've already seen is another part, with the same intention of putting key code in one place.

So the question about your "html pages" is what the html looks like. If its got stuff like the header and footer, that's fine, you can display it easily in a resource (with a [[*contents]] template), but it will be hard to change, and the way to "fix" that would be to cut out the footer contents, put it into the template, and then delete the footer contents from every page...which could be done with a batch command I believe, not my area though.

You can understand that chopping up the files may be tough. And in-line css, while I use it a lot, is precisely not portable or easily changable.

So, you may have to consider what bits need saving and how to do it.

Quote from: nuan88 at Jul 01, 2018, 09:44 PM

Hey Julius:
So, you may have to consider what bits need saving and how to do it.

There is the 1 main page, then there are a few (4) Image Map Pages which then link to country pages. Each country can have from one to many pages usually arranged by historical period. Each Country page uses a Table format. Column 1 is a low res pix of a coin, col 2 & 3 various historical data. Each entry in a table cell, then links to a Details page which then pulls in high res photos & other stuff.

I have no problem recoding, just that I need to figure out how to get started.

The header of each Country Page would be unique to that country. It had javascript in it to have these flipping coin buttons --but those can wait. Same for the footer. Also in the footer I had the "statcounter code". It was useful for tracking the few visitors I got.

The new design of the site will hopefully use Disqus as I noticed a Modx plugin for that. Also my old Developer installed a lot of plugins I don't think I need I guess they just install the usual.

There's no need to get the whole thing working at once. If I get the main page, & the menus, I can get one major country up: like Brazil. I have a lot of info on Brazil. Then I can go a country at a time at my own pace.

However, it is interesting how bad the under 5K developers are. If they're good at coding then they're really bad at explaining stuff. I was even thinking of making a "How to do an Advanced Modx Install & Common Problems" video myself.

Finding coding help is always a challenge, especially when you as the client doesn't have a solid knowledge of the work to be done. Now that you have honed in on the technology you will be able to get help at better rates and be more effective.

I would put some of these html documents into resources or into templates and see what appears.

For changing header pictures and footers for sections, then usually templates are the way to go, but there are other tools that can do that work for you. If you would then have a whole lot of templates however it would begin to make less sense. But if you had say less than 20 countries then it would be ok, more than that a different setup might be in order.

Do you think you would have a Brazil section with subpages and other contents? Or just a Brazil page with pretty much all the Brazil stuff all there?

The former is more like templates, the latter more like a header/footer tool. In my estimation