Grawlix is a content management system (CMS) for webcomics.
To install Grawlix, you will need a web host with support for:
- MySQL
- PHP 7.0+
A version of Grawlix for PHP 5.x is also available, see the php5-compatible branch.
- Download the Grawlix files.
- To download the files most easily, click the big "Code" button near the top of the Github repository, and select "Download ZIP" from the dropdown menu.
- Create a MySQL database on your site's host, or elsewhere that you can connect to. Note down the database host, name, username, and password.
- With an FTP client*, check your site folder and make sure it is empty. Some files, such as .htaccess, might be hidden by default. On your FTP client, make sure you have it set to show hidden files under View, Settings, or Preferences.
- Open the Grawlix version folder. This folder contains the subfolders _admin, _system, etc. Drag all of the contents of the Grawlix version folder into your main site folder.
- Among these contents is a file called "htaccess.txt". Change the name of this one to ".htaccess".
- Once you load up the new Grawlix install, it should redirect you to /firstrun. Enter your database credentials, and your user credentials.
- Grawlix should guide you from there!
If your new Grawlix site is giving you internal server errors, there's a line in .htaccess that you may need to uncomment, specifically:
RewriteBase /
Again, you may need to 'Show Hidden Files' in order to see the .htaccess file.
*FTP CLIENTS: Some hosts provide a web FTP client, but some free ones you can download include Cyberduck and Filezilla.
Note: By default, Disqus comments use the URL to identify the pages, which may cause threads to appear on the wrong pages if you delete any pages. Please see /assets/snippets/snippet.comments.php, there is a line you can uncomment to make Disqus use the unique page ID instead, which should avoid this problem. The "wrong" behaviour is default to facilitate upgrading from older versions of Grawlix, but we will probably make the better behaviour default when we officially release Grawlix 1.6.0.
If you already have Grawlix installed, you should be able to just upload the new files to update. However, make sure you don't overwrite the files you've customised, these include:
.htaccess/htaccess.txtconfig.php, if you overwrite this one, Grawlix won't be able to access the database!
Either don't upload or delete firstrun.php, this file is only used for installing Grawlix the first time.
If you're upgrading from version 1.2 or older, run _admin/_upgrade-to-1.3x.php, and then delete it when you're done. If you're upgrading from 1.3 or newer, then you don't need to run it and can delete it, or skip uploading it.
If you're using Disqus comments and updating from 1.5 or earlier, you may need to change assets/snippets/snippet.comments.php and comment out the line that sets the disqus_identifier to avoid breaking your existing comments. Unfortunately, prior to 1.6, the disqus_identifier wasn't set, causing Disqus to use the URL instead of the page ID, which would cause comments to get misaligned if you deleted pages.
If you run into issues with your archive being displayed incorrectly, go into your archive settings, change the layout to something else, save, then change it back to what you want and save.