Everyone has great ideas about how our site can be improved.  Not everyone, however, has the ability to take these ideas and turn them into reality.

How can we address this?

I, for one, would be more than willing to donate some of my time to improving the BW site by attempting to implement new features or improvements... but I am a complete beginner when it comes to hacking.  I have no understanding of how the site works, and am only just competent with basic HTML.  BUT, that doesn't mean that I (or anyone else with half a brain) am not perfectly capable of learning, given the right access to resources and a bit of guidance.

How do we empower more of our members to become doers, rather than just thinkers? 

How about assembling a small taskforce to prepare explanatory material that introduces us non-geek crowd to the basics of how BW works (perhaps starting with Drupal, if that is where we are headed soon...?).  A downloadable pdf guide, perhaps?  Maybe a series of youtube videos?  How about some kind of sandbox environment where any BW member can learn and experiment with changes to the site without fear of messing something up, or compromising sensitive data?

What do you think?

How could we make this happen?

x Jon

I noticed that I didn't comment on the suggestion of having a sand box...

It wouldn't really make much sense to have a public sandbox because you couldn't really change code there. Or if you could, it would be too hard to ensure that it isn't already broken when you start working on it (as you might not be the only one).

If you want a sand box install of ROX, you should set up a local install on your computer and play there. That way nobody but you can break it and you have the freedom to start over with clean sources whenever you want to.

Righto, thanks for the encouragement you lot :)

Before I saw crumbking's post I found myself this: http://devzone.zend.com/4/php-101-part-1-down-the-rabbit-hole/ ,which so far has been pretty easy to follow.  I do actually have a tiny bit of programming behind me (C+ or something similar) so the PHP concepts aren't too hard to grasp.... yet.  Now I can do echoes and variable assignments and simple math. Huzzah.

BUT

That link crumbking gave about downloading Rox...? WTF? That went way over my head.  I'm not an Anonymous Git... am I?

Can anyone give me (and the newbies following this thread?) a plain human-language guide on how to get a virtual BeWelcome site running on their bog-standard windows machine?  And perhaps if you have time, a run-down on what the hell this Git thing is?  Obviously some kind of system for tracking revisions to the site, or something, right?

Other than that, though, this is fun.

More!

I totally agree, if it didn't take weeks of nasty useless work to get a local version BW running, I would be happy to fix a bug here and then. Unfortunatly creating your own developement env. seems too much of headache.. drupal is doing a great job on that aspect: they have a linux live CD you can run in wmware.

Hi Pedalr

I think you have just captured the situation nicely and concicely.

The problem on the software side of bW.

The reluctance of anyone who can see the situation to go anywhere near it.

The reluctance of the developers to let their baby or let anyone with any vision that differes from theirs or wants to plan anything or that will make them look lazy, to get anywhere near it, while they play with it.  This is utter stupidity, ignorance and poisons the whole project, the community and its members.

This really is no diffrent to CS or HC.

The community needs and deserves better.

I would be supprised if there wern't 50 developers in the community who would give at least an hour a week(thats the equilivent to one or more fulltime developers), if there was some order and structure in the project, otherwise involvement in the mess of code and is discorganisation, as mental polution.  This is like taking a sharp knife and stiring a pot of stones with it.  It will make it less sharp.  Which is why sharp developers, stay away and somethning we need to address as a matter of urgency.  To do this we need to take some ligitimate decisions.

LnP

Jon,
If you need help with setting up a WAMP environment, try something like e.g. wampserver.com. That should make most of the process automatic. Once you have reached this point, the INSTALL file (I mistakenly called it README) before. If you have problems, try the developer list as Meinhard (planetcruiser) suggested.

Unfortunately, you will need to learn a little bit about web technologies like web servers and their modules if you want code locally. But this is really not too big a step to take because there is plenty of tutorials and installers around for these things. :)

I dont understand why the repository gets downloaded from this Gitorious.org site rather than from BeWelcome.org - Is it because Gitorious hosts the "Staging" code (ie, updated bits of code that haven't yet been committed to the actual website) or is it an up-to-date mirror/backup of the bewelcome.org site, or what?

As you said, you are cloning not downloading as such. As soon as there is a new ROX release, a

git pull

will update your sources to the latest version without just overriding your local changes (it will warn you about collisions).

Furthermore, you can switch to the develop branch which is the precursor of the next release and usually runs on alpha.bewelcome.org (well, maybe not exactly the last commit).

And you can start your own branch. If you make major changes which you only want to commit once you have thoroughly tested them, you can actually create your own branch and merge it into develop when you're done.

Possibilities are endless... ;)

P.S.: Should I bring the laptop tonight for the Melbourne meeting? ;)

Oops. My mental diary has been malfuntioning a lot recently. I must be getting old... Anyway, I wanted to check the date again before I head out (I work around the corner) but hadn't done that, yet. ;)

Ok, ground control: need a little help here.

I installed WAMP, I even think I understand what it does (it's like having your very own web server to fiddle with, except it runs straight out of a folder on your hard disk, not from someone else's computer over the net, right?)

(WAMP version: 32 Bits & PHP 5.4, 2.2E -- Apache 2.2.22 – Mysql 5.5.24 – PHP 5.4.3  XDebug  2.1.2  XDC 1.5  PhpMyadmin 3.4.10.1  SQLBuddy 1.3.3  webGrind 1.0 -- Good choice??)

Then I grabbed the Rox folder I downloaded earlier, and I stuck it in the "www" folder in C:/Wamp/, thinking that this is probably how I go about emulating the BW site.

But when I open up localhost in Firefox and navigate to the "Rox" project, I get an error:

(!) Strict standards: Non-static method DOMDocument::load() should not be called statically, assuming $this from incompatible context in C:wampwwwroxroxlauncherenvironmentexplorer.php on line 67

I hunted down the environmentexplorer.php file and line 67 of it reads:

if (!$B = DOMDocument::load(SCRIPT_BASE.'base.xml')) {
            die('base.xml error!');

This has got something to do with a missing database perhaps??  Help!

While on databases, did that BW download include a bunch of user profiles to play with, or will I need to go an make some fake profiles for testing?  My aim at the moment is to get some semblance of a fully-functioning BW site running on my PC so I can just go and blindly start fiddling and learn a few things by observation.

I'm also watching this incredibly boring youtube video, which explains the process of creating a web page for logging a user into a website.  So freaking mind-numbing, yet I get the feeling I'm learning some pretty useful stuff watching it - it's all about tying in HTML, PHP and MySql databases, which are totally new territory for me...

Onward!

Thanks Matthias.

Hmmm, confusing: I'd skipped that file because I have WAMP installed and it, well, told me that the entire process could be skipped if I have WAMP.

So I've downloaded bewelcome.sql.gz and put it in my WAMP/www/Rox/ folder for now. (Is that the right location?)

Heading back to part 1 of the INSTALL file, I'm stumped.  Those lines of code (eg, mysql -u root -p -e 'CREATE DATABASE bewelcome') look like Linux command-line instructions to me - is that correct?  I tried opening windows cmd.exe and running one, but no luck.  Can I run those commands somewhere else or do I need to follow a different set of instructions for windows users.

Thanks for humoring me, all :)  Think I'll have to compile a Beginners Guide to Emulating BW once I get through all this...

I have to congratulate you Jon. I think you have just found your first ticket to open and assign to yourself. :-P I actually tried hard to make ROX fit for PHP 5.3 before we moved to the current server and you are now trying on PHP 5.4. So, you can make the code fit for PHP 5.4. ;-)

With PHP 5.4 you will probably have to go through your PHP configuration and make it to be as lax on things as possible. Otherwsie, you'll probably end up with a lot of errors. :(

As far as the DB goes, putting the dump in the document root as you did will not do anything. You will have to import it into MySQL. The dump you downloaded is compressed,so you will have to uncompress it first (depending on your Windows version you might have to download some software that can handle GZip/gz) and then you can follw the instructions on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/105776/how-do-i-restore-a-mysql-dump-file

Awesome - thanks for all the help everyone.

I'm banning myself from fiddling with this until after a deadline tomorrow.  Then I'll be re-installing wamp (thanks for the offer, christian - graciously declining for now ;)  and seeing how crumbking's instructions go...

If it works, I'll try writing an English version of the install guide for Windows.  Fingers crossed :)

Mmm, so. PHP 5.3.13 now onboard.

I opened up the phpMyAdmin service as crumbking described, and tried importing the database.  First, I tried importing bewelcome.sql.gz. -- I got this error message:

     Error

     SQL query:

     --
     -- Table structure for table `NbMembersByCities`
     --
      DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `NbMembersByCities` ;

      MySQL said:

      #1046 - No database selected

Is 'NbMembersByCities' another database that I need to import first?

Next, I tried unzipping bewelcome.sql.gz and importing it as bewelcome.sql.  This time I got a different error message:

     No data was received to import. Either no file name was submitted, or the file size exceeded the maximum size permitted by your PHP configuration. See FAQ 1.16.

I hunted around for php.ini and found two instances of it: C:/wamp/bin/php/php5.3.13/php.ini and C:/wamp/bin/apache/apache2.2.22/bin/php.ini and changed the line:

upload_max_filesize = 2M

in both of them to read:

upload_max_filesize = 5M

...but this had no effect. The phpMyAdmin import page still says there's a 2MB file upload limit (this is the year 2012, right??).

Anyhoo. Stumped.

Any suggestions?

x

Garrgh. Baby steps.

I figured that I needed to first make a MySQL user (username = bewelcome, password = password) with an associated database (db name = bewelcome).  So I did.

Then I imported the bewelcome.sql.gz file into the database I just made.  Success!

Back to INSTALL instructions.

I edited /htdocs/.htaccess.example and saved it as ".htaccess".  Here are my changes:

@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
 php_flag register_argc_argv off
 RewriteEngine On
-RewriteBase /
+RewriteBase /bw/htdocs/
 
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule ^/*([^/]*).php /bw/$1.php [L,R,QSA]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then I edited /rox_default.example.ini and saved it as "rox_default.ini".  Changes are:

@@ -2,11 +2,11 @@
 ; database dsn (see: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pdo.php)

 dsn  = "mysql:host=localhost;dbname=bewelcome"

 ; username

 user     = bewelcome

 ; password

-password = bewelcome

+password = password

 ; dbupdate. Can be

 ;  * "dbupdate = manual" - this means, you need phpmyadmin to do all the db manipulations yourself. or

 ;  * "dbupdate = auto" (default) - then the "htdocs/bw/lib/dbupdate.php" will take care of the updates.

 dbupdate = manual

------------------------------------------------------------------------

And lo and behold, when I go to the Rox project on my WAMP server, I get this nicely descriptive error message:

(Header: "500 Internal Server Error", Address: "localhost/rox/htdocs/"

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, admin@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

--------------

BLERGH!

Thanks Matthias - I've gotta head off too. But I'll jump on that chat thing whenever I can next.

In the meantime.... :S ideas?

Thanks crumbking.  I did all that - all at once, so I'm not sure which part caused a change, but now I get:

     "Data dir 'C:/wamp/www/rox/htdocs/../data' does not exist!"

I've been scouring through various files trying to find references to this data directory, but no luck.

One thing just occurred to me:

Some of the install instructions refer to http://localhost/bw/htdocs/ (like your advised setting for the baseuri variable, or the setting for the rewrite base)

In other places I can see references to /bewelcome/htdocs/

...But there is neither a /bw directory nor a /bewelcome directory in my install.  The repository downloaded into a directory named Rox - so my path would be http://localhost/Rox/htdocs/ ...right?

I tried changing the refernces in both rox_local.ini and .htaccess, but still get the same error message above.  Perhaps there's another file that needs attention?

Confused :S

"have you ever checked our gitorious stream"

No, and I've asked several times before - is there one single list/location, of all the resources, mailing lists, alpha sites, dev groups, blogs, wikis, etc.? Subdivide a single page into "user resources" and "dev resources" if you like.  Or is that asking too much? 

"but we can't abandon ship without having a new one, can we?"

Did someone ask for that?

"but [we] need to be pragmatic and realistic right now"

I am that, but I am still not "informed".  And I'm clearly not the only person who feels this way.  I see person after person, with obvious coding skills and enthusiasm, having the same frustrating experience.

"the current website needs to be maintained and updated regularly, even while a rewrite is happening, so the community doesn't get the impression it has been abandoned."

How do you think the community perceives BW currently?  Is the goal you've just described being achieved, or to what degree?

It's also news to me, that migration to Drupal is not being undertaken currently.  I mean, I could see (some amount of) evidence that this is the case, but this is the first time I've heard it directly from the horse's mouth.

Thank you, Matthias! :)

Ooh, exciting.  I tried making the data folder as crumbking suggested, but it didn't work.   But then I got to look at jsfan's install on linux and noticed the folder structure in /data

So I re-made the /data folder and in it I added

/data/gallery

/data/groups

/data/user  AND

/data/user/avatars

And now..... here's what hapens:

It's getting there, eh?

Any obvious things to check out, before I go blindly hacking away at it??

:)

I'm pretty sure this would be the short_open_tag. Looks the same for me when I switch those off.

Could someone maybe deliver us from this stupid requirement? :(

EDIT: I decided to make this official: Issue #1700 on trac. :)

OK.  Just documenting a few more bugs in my local install, since I'm probably not going to figure out the one above by myself.  Below is a what happens when I browse a forum thread (Can't paste the formatting correctly.  You get the picture though, right?)

Could this be a problem with my WAMP configuration? It seems more like a glitch in the actual site code to me, but then... you know... two weeks ago I didn't even know what PHP was :D

x

-------------------------------------------------------------------

jeanyves

Well, this is quite a learning experience.

Heading off on a tangent, I've been exploring the option of a LAMP environment running on a virtual machine.  So far, so good.  I've setup a virtual computer running Ubuntu 12.04, PHP5.3, Apache2 and MySql.  Following the INSTALL file instructions, I've managed to get the BW website almost running on my Localhost.  By 'almost' I mean the homepage displays fine.  The only problem at the moment is that when I click a menu item from the top orange header menu (ie, "about") I get a Page Not Found error:

The requested URL /rox/htdocs/about was not found on this server.

This is the same for pretty much all of the menu items ("find members", "explore" etc)

Logging in as a user (i tried "fake51" with no password) worked, but again, most links were dead after that.

I'd love to upload my virtual machine .ova file somewhere for any of you to look at and play with, but it's 2.4GB in size and will take an eternity with our silly Aussie ADSL speeds.

I git-cloned the repository and put the resulting Rox folder into /var/www

I also created the rox/data folder with subfolders as described above.  Not sure what method I used to create them (ie file explorer or command line sudo mkdir) - could this be part of my problem?

Here's my rox_local.ini file:

[db]
dsn = "mysql:host=localhost;dbname=bewelcome"
user = "bewelcome"
password = "password"

[env]
baseuri = "http://localhost/rox/htdocs/"

[google]
maps_api_key = "1234567890"

[phpflickr]
api = "cbc166b80eb3ab04ad27845703752024"
tmpfolder = "/tmp"

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

and my .htaccess file: (i don't think the backslashes work on this forum - anyway, the only line i changed was the rewrite base setting:

php_flag register_argc_argv off
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /rox/htdocs/

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^/*([^/]*).php /bw/$1.php [L,R,QSA]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^.* index.php [L,QSA,PT]

------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyhoo.  Hope someone can help...

:)

Thanks crumbking...

I tried those changes, but no luck.  I noticed that, for example, the 'find members' header menu points to "localhost/rox/htdocs/search", whereas the search.php file is located in "localhost/rox/htdocs/bw/seach.php" - so I tried setting baseuri = "http://localhost/rox/htdocs/bw/".

After that, all the images on the homepage dissappeared.  When I clicked the text hyperlink "Find members", I no longer got a Page Not Found error, instead I got another image-less page with this error on it.

(url=http://localhost/rox/htdocs/bw/search):

ErrorTodoPage

Sorry, the page /rox/htdocs/bw/search.php is not yet ready.

Maybe you can volunteer your services as a programmer to help us complete the page.

-----------------

Well, stumped again... :S

"I git-cloned the repository and put the resulting Rox folder into /var/www"

"RewriteBase /rox/htdocs/"

Is the name of that folder "Rox" or "rox"? the letters should  be the same, both lower case (or upper case)

BTW: do you still have your WAMP installation on? You could edit line 42 in the file htdocs/index.php :

ini_set('display_errors', 1);

to

ini_set('display_errors', 0);

So I have both WAMP and LAMP environments going at the same time. Both dysfunctional so far, but WAMP is slightly better resolved.

BUT - what appeals to me about the LAMP setup is that it is a fully packaged virtual computer.  Which means that if I set if up properly, all we need to do is distribute it to whoever would like to be involved in developing BW, and they have an instantly working, fully featured development environment that can be run on ANY operating system, as long as they have VirtualBox installed.  It even has all the required software pre-installed and ready to go - no messy installing required, no endless list of instructions to follow.  Newbies like me will be able to jump straight to actually learning about PHP/HTML/MySql etc and start messing with the site code straight away.  This seems like a really worthwhile project to see through to completion, right?

-----------------------

BW Developers:  Since I'm generally stabbing around in the dark at this stage, would any of you like to volunteer to have me (snail)mail you a USB key with my LAMP virtual machine on it, to see if you can spot something obviously wrong with the Rox installation?  It may be something that you can identify within a few minutes.  I can make copies if more than one person is interested.  After that, send it back and I'll add some online instructions for keeping the Rox code base on the VM up to date using Git (I'll need some help...), links to learning resources, and some simple 'getting started' instructions.

@Jon: You got this on a laptop? I'm happy to meet up and go through it. I'm not sure if my VirtualBox is actually fit for use (never used it), so a USB key might not do the trick straight away.

Tim, I really wasn't planning to ever reply to any of your posts again but this post just pisses me off too much. Instead of talking about how you want to get your head around ROX, and decrying every single aspect of BW, you should put your money where your mouth is and get active. The code is there for you to download. Just like Jon, you will also get assistance from active developers if you need it and maybe you will even be spared of empty promises and useless comments about how hard it all is and how nobody is helping.

Practice what you preach instead of just spamming the forums and show some truly collaborative spirit!

I'm sorry if I'm being too blunt but I needed to get this out of my system!

jsfan

I'm sorry you had to get pissed off to reply. Never say never.

'Instead of talking about how you want to get your head around ROX, and decrying every single aspect of BW'
I don't decry 'every single aspect of BW', just the poor bits, but that's, almost the same thing. I have many times said that most of the underlying system is 70-80% or more, complete and a great effort, but is that enough?

'you should put your money where your mouth is and get active. The code is there for you to download.'

I downloaded it, just before christmas and found that the install documentation was incomplete, I even spent(read wasted) two weeks trying to install Ubuntu, only to eventually be told on the official Ubuntu IRC channel that since 10.4 Ubuntu had not been stable. When running firefox on a fresh install of Ubuntu put both the CPU and HD at 100% activity and hung and crashed, I spent hours and hours, at a command prompt feeding back and forth to 'experts' in the channel, one who gave me frightening warnings to back up my HD because it was about to die, according Ubuntu diags, I uninstalled it and everything was fine again.

Later in the dev list, it was discovered that the code on GIT was in fact in no shape to work on and needed extensive work to get it in to shape. Fortunately this work was done and I am hoping that a retry at installing will be fruitful. Also I found that I did not get the help I needed, when running into problems. I have not let this put be off forEVER and am willing to give it another go, once it has been proved by Jon.

I will put a great deal of my money(read time and LIFE) where my big mouth is, when I am confident is will not be pissing it away. As I said at the time, there are infinite ways, that I can waste my life, pissing about with a process that can't work, isn't on that I choose. I would have wasted far less time, writing the functionality of bW from scratch, but no one would be happy even if I delivered a fully functioning bW clone. Like these posts, the powers that be, would ignore it also.

'useless comments about how hard it all is and how nobody is helping.'
Yes totally useless to speak the truth, if no one listens! Thouse that have eyes, let them see.

I'm sorry if i'm being blunt, but we need to get attitudes like yours out of this system.

Jon

I have a thick skin and don't mind people throwing daggers at me and have come to expect it around here. People should take my comments with un poco de sal. I know I have an aggressive/passive style, but it saves me from wasting my time with BS.

Thank you greatly for your update. I understand that you have a life, so no worries, take your time. None of this is going anywhere, whenever you are ready, it'll be good. ;) If you have any documentation, it would be interesting to have a look at. Don't worry about it being in draft form, or incomplete. I may be able to spot something you have missed, fresh eye are always good for spotting the woods, with no trees in the way. :) By the sounds of it you have brough this on a good long way. Well done and congrtulations.

LnP

Owzer!

I just discovered the wiki on how to write a simple "hello word" app for BW-Rox.  And then, along with it, a whole bunch of other wiki pages dedicated to explaining the mechanics of Rox.

Dev team:  Seriously, this is the BEST kind of resource for people like me to learn from, and yet it is so well hidden it has taken me months to find it.  And I like to think I'm the kind of person who is good at tracking down info like that.

I know, much of it looks like it will be out of date by now.  I still don't have any time this week to test it or do more work on this.  But for now, could any of you have a look over stuff like the "hello word" wiki and let me/us know what is still relevant?  And if possible, update the info to reflect the current build?

Secondly, the info needs to be made accessible!  I can put my hand up for linking to these wikis from somewhere more prominent (like the main BW wiki homepage), starting next week when I'll hopefully get some time to do it.  At the very least, we need to make it clear to everyone that there is a whole seperate wiki on trac.bewelcome.org, completely apart from the www.bewelcome.org wiki.  If I'd realised this earlier, I would have found this info much quicker....

And while I'm here: Is there any more info like this flating around some obscure part of cyberspace that someone like me would find useful??

@JonJon: "At the very least, we need to make it clear to everyone that there is a whole seperate wiki on trac.bewelcome.org, completely apart from the www.bewelcome.org wiki"

done by adding a "Developers" section to http://www.bewelcome.org/wiki. btw: it's a wiki, if you miss something, add it! :)

generally it is agreed to keep forum and wiki on www.bewelcome.org free from developer related things as much as possible and to use mailing list and trac/redmine wikis instead. i think the average bw user does not care much about the lamps and gits of web development. and they shouldn't, they should mainly find things relevant to their travels and sharing here.

Or make the seperation clearer, by running the software development, as a seperate but related bV project, which would free the developers to make a versatile multiuse, multi instance, networked hospex platform and fulfil part of the bV objective.  Leaving this project clearly focused on hospex and not distracted too much with software development.

LnP

sounds great.  Thanks for puttin the time in.

I can't get the file and get this instead

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /BWbuntu.ova on this server.

Any ideas?

LnP

Working now :)

LnP

On bWBuntu ...

How much space is required to import this image into virtualbox?

I have downloaded the and have 2.5 Gig free on the target drive, but it keeps running out of space, I can free more, but how much will it need?

Thanks

LnP

Not sure if its of any interest / or exactly on topic:

ComeHackWithUs (CHWU)

http://www.ciol.com/Security/Interviews/%E2%80%98ComeHackWithUs-to-take-coders-to-a-remote-island%E2%80%99/164703/0/

- an upcoming hacking event on open source projects. Organizer from the 2008 C$ collective in Alaska.

As I'm curious as well, I git-cloned rox and gave it a go after installing wampserver with PHP 5.3. (Tried my luck with 5.4 as well to no avail.)

I have the system running but there are some loose ends:

• Someone used a symbolic link to point to the latest version of htmlpurifier-4.0.0. Well, that's just not working under windows...
• Several pages still don't work instead they produce urls like this: http://localhost/rox/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/
• Only Firefox works here. Chrome and IE show access forbidden
• After login in as fake51 (thanks for the password tip jsfan) I see some differences to the current version on the website. How does that work?

I dig a bit deeper tomorrow.

Someone used a symbolic link to point to the latest version of htmlpurifier-4.0.0. Well, that's just not working under windows...

I can't say I'm surprised. There are two symbolic links (the other one being htdocs/bw/memberphotos -> ../memberphotos). I suspect you could just replace them with what they link to. In the latter case you might even be able to live without the link.

Several pages still don't work instead they produce urls like this: http://localhost/rox/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/htdocs/

It's probably best to run Rox at the top level of your virtual host, to have http://localhost has your base URI. Everything else will probably lead to problems eventually and this might be one of those already.

Only Firefox works here. Chrome and IE show access forbidden

That's a bit weird. Maybe your web server does not default to using index.php as the directory index and FF uses that automatically? Also, you will need to use mod_rewrite and enable the htdocs/.htaccess to make all the links work.

After login in as fake51 (thanks for the password tip jsfan) I see some differences to the current version on the website. How does that work?

What kinds of differences? While you have the same software, you obviously might have different configuration. That influences things like e.g. the visibility of the donation bar.

The extra items are due to privileges the account has.

The current words table is much larger than the one in the test database which is why I never added it. But maybe it would be a good idea.

If I get around to it, I'll update the VirtualBox image soon as well.

I use Eclipse but if you don't want to get into trouble with planetcruiser, you should make sure your indentation is set to 4 spaces (Eclipse default is tabs).

Another option might be phpstorm which is not free software but can be used freely for free software projects. Of course, that would imply switching to the dark side. ;)

Thanks to the VirtualBox image I got rox running.

I changed the following in the httpd.conf so that rox is running at http://localhost/:

DocumentRoot "c:/wamp/www/rox/htdocs"

#
# Each directory to which Apache has access can be configured with respect
# to which services and features are allowed and/or disabled in that
# directory (and its subdirectories).
#
# First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of
# features. 
#
<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
</Directory>

<Directory "c:/wamp/rox/row/htdocs">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
</Directory>

In rox_local.ini that means the following has to be set:

[env]
baseuri = "http://localhost/"

After that the site works locally.

But I'm still searching for a user with normal rights. sitarane doesn't work in the test db as no password is set. globe-test can translate everything.

The main issue I have is that I don't see the opt-out feature for the profile visitors with any of the users I tried.

Cheers, shevek

Ok, let's work down the list of questions, shall we?

1. Opt-out: This requires preferences which I've only just added to the sample database.
2. Normal user account: You can either reset the passwords of all accounts as suggested in the INSTALL file, or you can add the lines
   
   [development]
   avoid_https = true
   skip_password_check = true
   
   to your rox_local.ini to disable SSL (more or less) and switch of password comparison on login.
   
   
3. Eclipse: Can't tell you much there. I'm actually not big on IDEs and used Emacs until very recently. All I did in Eclipse is set the indentation to comply (4 spaces, no tabs). I don't use eGit or any other fancy plug-ins.
4. phpstorm: Can't help you with details. I've seen people using it but never used it myself.