Allright, new year and stuff: let’s try to be useful, for once.
So I am looking into this TYPO3 thing. It is a huge ass content management framework that can do anything up to achieving World Peace, if I am to believe the papers around me. The people around me, however, warn me that its Typoscript is a complicated pain that is looking nothing similar to other such languages. We’ll see. First it needs to be installed and that is what I just did. There is an OK official Getting Started Tutorial for it, but it misses some points that I want to address here, in the specific case of a GoDaddy Linux hosting account.
Caveat: this is no expert opinion here, I am basically a n00b. However, my installation worked. So this is for anyone like me: a beginner with a Cyberduck client, a GoDaddy Linux account and a (very old) mac. The words below are to help you avoid time consuming mistakes that I have made. Do not ask me questions about other hosters than GoDaddy. Do not ask me questions about other FTP clients than Cyberduck. Also, anti-GoDaddy trolls will be ignored.
Making your GoDaddy Linux/Shared Hosting account fit for TYPO3
First, you need to make sure that PHP version 5.x is set up in your GoDaddy account – mine was not. So:
- Log in to your GoDaddy account.
- Go to My Products > Hosting.
- Launch the Control Center by clicking on the button that reads, well, Launch the Control Center.
- Under the panel Server, look at the PHP Version.
- If it is NOT set to 5.x, go to the menu Content > Add on Language.
- Choose PHP 5.x and click on continue. There is one more message that you need to confirm by clicking on update.
- GoDaddy says, it takes up to 24 hours for the change to take place. Mine was available at once.
While you are still logged in, go create a database:
- Go to the Menu Databases > MySQL.
- Click on Create Database.
- Enter whatever you want for Description, MySQL Database/User Name and Password. Make sure the latest is strong enough though, and that the MySQL version is set to 5.0.
- Click OK. It will be ready in a few minutes, so go on.
Download, read, upload
Download the installation package (at http://typo3.org/download/ ) and follow the instructions – however, not those of INSTALL.txt, but the ones of the Getting Started Tutorial.
The Getting Started Tutorial mentions FileZilla as FTP client but you want to use Cyberduck because that is the one you like. There is no big difference except this one: you want to make sure that Cyberduck does not change the files permissions during the upload. Control this by going to Cyberduck > Preferences > Permissions. If you don’t do this, you will end up with a mess, because TYPO3 requires different permissions between files and folders. Doing this also allows you to skip the CHMOD part of the tutorial.
Make sure you upload the TYPO3 installation files onto the root folder of your web server. You can deal with subdomains later (I don’t know how yet, but so I read – probably some .htaccess tweaking). By the way, if your speed is as catastrophically slow as mine, let the upload run overnight. Although Cyberduck will prompt you to change to sFTP, prefer FTP this time, it will be quicker.
Find the welcome message
Once you have reached the welcome message and need to enter your database details, change localhost to the host name that GoDaddy has attributed to your database – it reads something like name_of_your_database.db.some_numbers.hostedresource.com. You can find it in your GoDaddy account where you created the database in the first place.
A mean last one: what is the username?
When you are to log in for the first time, you are asked for a username… that you did not set up. And the tutorial says nothing about that. How mean is that? The username is: admin. Yes, i freaked out for some seconds too.
edit: on the first page of the frontend, there is actually a big box entitled How do I login? Duh…