Third Party Applications October 5, 2004 at 3:52 pm

Silva CMS – Installer for MacOS X

A package installer for the Silva CMS system on OSX.

The package maker is looking to get feedback from people running OS X Server on how the package installer works.

If you are interested in an easy to deploy Content Management System, this may be for you.

I don’t have MacOS X Server available, please test on non-productive systems.

What is Silva?

Silva
is an open source, completely browser based CMS for creating
publications for the web, paper, and other media. Content is stored in
a clean and future-proof format, independent of layout and
presentation, suitable for use in multiple contexts. Silva allows
novice users to enter new documents as well as edit existing documents
using a simple web interface (WYSIWYG or form based).

For more information about Silva, please see:

http://www.infrae.com/products/silva

Silva MacOS X Installer (1.1-all, final)

I have created this Silva MacOS X Installer (tested only on MacOS X 10.3.5, client version)
to simplify the installation procedure. The installer installs all the
bells and whistles to run Silva-1.1-all. The package should be
completely self-contained and not be depending on python or any library
already installed on the system. The package is currently 20 mb in size.

The installer does the following:

  • creates the user zope in the netinfo database to run the zope server
  • creates Silva in the /Applications folder and copies all files into this directory

List of installed items
Python and Python libraries:

Zope and Zope Products:

Quickstart: Starting/stoping Silva and logging in

The installer comes with a ready to use Silva site in /Applications/Silva/Sites.
A Silva root is already installed, all Silva Extensions and Group
support activated and Silva is configured to store all assets (Silva
Files and Silva Images) on the file system in /Applications/Silva/Sites/DefaultSite/var/repository and not the ZODB.

Open the Terminal application and change directory to /Applications/Silva/Sites/DefaultSite/bin.
Start the Silva site by typing
sudo -u zope ./zopectl start and stop it by typing
sudo -u zope ./zopectl stop.
You will be asked to enter the admin password for these tasks. To log
into the Silva Management Interface (SMI) at the point your internet
browser, preferably Mozilla, to http://localhost:8080/silva/edit (see below for login informations). Log into the Zope Management Interface (ZMI) by opening the url http://localhost:8080/silva/manage. In the future you can just append /edit or /manage to any existing url within your site to get in one of these interfaces.

By
copying SilvaStartUp from /Applications/Silva/Documents into
/Library/StartupItems the Silva sites get automatically started after
booting the computer. (NOT TESTED YET!)

Please note

It
is recommended to create a copy of the DefaultSite template for your
production site in the Sites folder and give it a reasonable, different
name; i.e. sudo -u zope cp -Rp DefaultSite MySite. Change the paths in /Applications/Silva/Sites/MySite/bin/runzope, /Applications/Silva/Sites/MySite/bin/zopectl and /Applications/Silva/Sites/MySite/etc/zope.conf to refelct the correct path to MySite. You must also change the admin password of the zope instance, which you can find in /Applications/Silva/Documents/admin-password.txt, as soon as possible! Further informations can be found in /Applications/Silva/Documents.

Updating

If
you are installing Silva on top of an existing Silva installation, your
Silva sites in the Sites sub-folder will not be affected as long as
they do not have the name DefaultSite. New versions of Python or Zope
will be installed in the Zope and Python, respectively, with the new
version string attached to their folder name. Therefore, you can still
run your sites with the old versions of these programs. Everything else
installed by the Silva installer will be replaced.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to

  • the guys at infrae who created Silva and making it open source,
  • the members of the mailing lists (general, developer) with their helpful tips and support,
  • Stéphane Sudre for creating Iceberg which really facilitate the creation of this installer tremendously and
  • Apple to give us a UNIX operating system.

About the Silva Installer

The installer was created by Marc Petitmermet, Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich Switzerland (although the installer has been completely assembled in my spare time;-).

Please send suggestions and bugs to Marc Petitmermet petitmermet at mat dot ethz dot ch.

I don’t have MacOS X Server available, please test on non-productive systems.

More Details

See http://www.zope.org/Members/mpetit

Leave a reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.