Initial Setup

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After Installation of ExiteCMS, and the selected themes and modules, it is time to execute the setup procedure. To do so, launch your favorite browser.

• In the following examples, we assume that your website is called www.example.com. You have to replace this by the name you have choosen for your new website.

To start the setup, point your browser to http://www.example.com/setup.php. This will start the setup procedure.

• Note that once you have completed the procedure, you can not run it again. It is protected against overwriting an existing configuration.
• If you really want to do it, delete the config.php file.

The first thing the setup will do, is check if all prerequisites are met. It will do a version check of your PHP and MySQL Installation, and it will check if it has write access to the specified paths of your new website.

If something is not correct, the center panel will show up red, and will list all problems you need to correct before continuing. When you have corrected them, just reload the page to have it checked again.

If everything checks out ok, the center panel will show up green, and you can continue with the setup process.

On the first setup screen, you will be asked to:

• Select your websites default locale
  Default the setup will start in English. If you select a different locale for your website, the setup program will also switch to that locale.

• Enter the host (name or IP address) that runs your MySQL database
  If it runs on the same machine your webserver runs, use localhost.

• Enter the name of the database
  This is the empty database you should have created before you started the setup procedure

• Enter a username and password
  This is the account information you need to connect to the database.

• Enter a table prefix
  It is possible that the database you have selected is not only used for ExiteCMS, but also for other purposes. In this case, it is handy to prefix all your ExiteCMS tables, so they are easy to identify. The default prefix is 'cms_'.

Once you have done this, click the Next Step button. The information you have entered will be validated, and if correct, the tables required by ExiteCMS are created.

In the second step of the setup procedure, you need to enter some information about the webmaster, the first user account created. You will be asked to:

• Enter the webmasters username
  It is common practice to use 'webmaster', and to use this account only for website management. For all other day-to-day management activities, assign administrator rights to the different users that need to perform these tasks.

• The webmasters password (twice!)
  As this is an account that has access to everything, it is very important to pick a strong password (more than 8 characters, upper- and lower case, and possibly other characters as well), and don't give it to anyone.

• The webmasters email address
  ExiteCMS needs a valid email address for every user account, so the user can be contacted. This address is also needed when you active the notify feature for the Forum and Private Messages modules.
  In addition to this, this email address is also used when communicating with your users, for example via the contact form.

Once you have done this, click the Next Step button. The information you have entered will be validated, and if correct, the webmaster account will be created.

Now the setup of ExiteCMS is complete.

Point your web browser to http://www.example.com, and login with your webmaster account to configure your website.

• This instruction made the assumption that you have installed ExiteCMS in the document root of your webserver. If you have installed it into a subdirectory of the document root, just replace http://www.example.com by http://www.example.com/sub/dir/.