Installation
You can use the "example site" bundled with the framework to set up a skeleton structure that you can use for all sites. With just a few settings changes, you'll be up and running in no time.
Step One: Uploading
The first thing you'll want to do is upload the example site to your Web space. There are three root folders: application, library, and public_html. The application and library folders should lie outside of your publicly viewable site. So, upload them accordingly.
Next you'll want to upload the publicly viewable files to your Web space. Any files and folders in the public_html folder should be uploaded to your publicly viewable site. On many Linux servers this folder would be "public_html" but may be "htdocs" or any other folder.
Step Two: Configuration
There are two files that you'll need to configure before you can use the site. They are the config.conf.php file in the "application/settings" folder and the .htaccess file in the "public_html" folder.
Open up config.conf.php from the "application/settings" folder.
The first thing you should know is that there are currently two environment types you can use. One is production (which is what you'll use on actual production servers) and the other is the development environment type (which is what you'll use for development). The only difference when you are in development mode is that it will load an extra settings file with some developer options (like enabling the debugger and so on).
This file just defines a bunch of settings that will be used through the framework and is fairly straightforward. We'll list the settings here and the description of what they should be filled in with. Most of them you probably won't have to change.
Make sure that all paths are entered without a trailing slash.
- ENVIRONMENT_TYPE - Either "production" or "development".
- DOMAIN - The domain that you're site resides on. Examples: "http://www.mydomainname.com" "http://www.good.food.org"
- ROOT - This is the absolute path to your root directory. This is where you uploaded the "application" and "library" folders. Make sure you put in the absolute path. Examples: "/home/user" "C:\Web Root\user"
- SITE_ROOT - This is the absolute path to the publicly viewable section of your site. Examples: "/home/user/public_html" "C:\Web Root\user\htdocs"
- SITE_URL - The URL to your site. This is usually just blank, unless you've placed it in a sub-directory of your site. This is relative to your top-level domain, so don't enter your domain, just put what would come after your domain. Examples: "/sub-folder" "/example"
- PATH_TO_LW_API - This should be the absolute path to the framework. You usually don't have to change this. The framework lies in the "library/lw-framework" folder.
The database settings are fairly straightforward and don't need to be touched unless you'll be using databases in this site.
The last thing you'll need to do is open up the .htacces file located under the "public_html" folder. This is the file that tells Apache how to rewrite the URL to point to the framework. This is called bootstrapping. This way we can have pretty URLs.
In this file change RewriteBase to the correct base URL for your site. This should be the same as the SITE_URL setting up above.
Step Three: Testing
At this point you should be done in setting up your site. Now it's time to make sure that it works.
The next step is to learn how the framework works and see how you can start building sites with it!