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dphillips edited this page Nov 26, 2010 · 4 revisions

System Requirements

Melody is software that installs on a web server, and users access the application through a web browser to perform tasks like publishing content or managing blogs. These system requirements describe what you will need on the server computer that runs Melody -- users can access the system from nearly any common computer with a web browser.

System Requirements Index

Basic Requirements

  • Server access via FTP, SSH, or telnet in order to install Melody.
  • A web server configured to execute CGI scripts written in Perl, the language which Melody is written in.
  • A web browser with Javascript enabled to access the Melody application once installed on the server.

Hardware

The specific requirements for Melody vary greatly depending upon the specific traffic and usage patterns being planned for. However, the minimum recommended setup includes a single machine with:

  • 1 GHz CPU;
  • 512 MB RAM;
  • 100 MB of available disk space for the application and dependencies.

Typically if the hardware you plan on using was purchased within the last three or four years, it should meet these minimum requirements.

Note on Disk Space: The application itself may require up to 20 MB of disk space. Please note however that this does not include the disk space required for your published blog content. The amount of disk space required for your published content will depend both on the number of blogs you deploy and the amount of data published on each blog.

Operating System

Melody has been is routinely tested on and is supported on the following operating systems, but may work on other recent systems:

  • All flavors of Unix including:
    • Mac OS X
    • Solaris, SunOS
    • RedHat Enterprise, Fedora and CentOS
    • Linux
    • BSD
  • Windows Server 2008
  • Windows IIS 7

Supported by Melody, but not regularly tested:

  • Windows IIS 5.x or 6.x
  • Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 2
  • Windows Server 2003, Service Pack 2

Note: Perl, PHP and web servers such as Apache HTTP Server are available for Unix-style operating systems such as Linux, BSDs and Mac OS X in addition to Windows. They are freely available and offered by most web hosting providers.

Web Server

Melody requires a web server capable of hosting and executing CGI scripts; all modern web servers capable of this. If you wish to utilize Melody's optional dynamic publishing feature then your web server will also need to be able host and execute PHP as well. While a number of web servers are capable of meeting these requirements, here is a list of all web servers the community regularly tests.

  • Apache 1.3x or 2.x (2.x recommended)
  • Windows Server 2008

Note: If using Apache web server, ability to use .htaccess files is additionally required by all versions of Melody in order to use PHP dynamic publishing.

Note: Melody does not currently support execution under mod_perl with Apache 2.x.

Perl

  • Perl 5.8.8 or above.
  • Active Perl 5.10.NN (perlis.dll) on Windows servers

Warning: Perl 5.8.0 has difficulty handling certain character encoding. When using Japanese characters in Perl 5.8.0, some of the characters may become garbled.

Melody will run on any platform that supports Perl version 5.6.1 or later, but only Perl version 5.8.8 or above are officially supported by the core development team.

PHP

Melody supports both static and dynamic publishing. Dynamic publishing however requires the use of PHP. Users are recommended to use PHP5 or later.

Warning: Use Melody with PHP 5.3 and later can result in "PHP Deprecated" warnings if Dynamic Publishing is used.

Database Requirements

The Melody community regularly tests and develops Melody using MySQL, making it the most reliable database on which to deploy Melody:

  • MySQL 4.0 or higher (MySQL 4.0 is supported, but version 4.1 or greater is recommended as 4.0 is no longer supported by MySQL.)

The community also maintains database drivers for:

  • PostgreSQL 7.x, PostgreSQL 8.x
  • SQLite

Perl Modules

Melody is constructed on an open source foundation via a Perl community, and uses external Perl modules. These modules can be downloaded for free with open source software from Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN)

Tip: Accessing the check.cgi script in the version of Melody will test and determine if the Perl modules it requires are installed on the server.

Installing Perl Modules requires shell access to the server. Ask your hosting provider for assistance if you are not able to install the modules.

Required Perl modules

  • CGI
  • Image::Size
  • File::Spec (Version 0.8 or higher)
  • CGI::Cookie

One of the following Database Perl Modules is required:

  • DBI (version 1.21 or higher)

  • DBD::mysql (version 2.9005 or higher) - When using MySQL database

    Warning: DBD::mysql 2.9004 is not recommended due to the error: "Statement has no result columns to bind". Later versions of DBD::mysql are recommended.

  • DBD::ODBC (version 1.13 or higher) - When using a database that can be accessed via an ODBC driver. Additional configuration will be required to use an ODBC database connection.

    Warning: Due to a problem with Melody user session management, DBD::ODBC 1.24 is not recommended. DBD::ODBC 1.23 or earlier is recommended until such time as a new version of DBD::ODBC is released.

Optional Perl Modules

The following Perl modules support option functions. Use these modules for even greater functionality with Melody.

  • Archive::Tar
  • Archive::Zip
  • Crypt::DSA
  • Crypt::SSLeay
  • Digest::MD5
  • Digest::SHA1
  • File::Temp
  • GD
  • HTML::Entities
  • HTML::Parser
  • Image::Magick
  • IO::Compress::Gzip
  • IO::Uncompress::Gunzip
  • IPC::Run
  • List::Util
  • LWP::UserAgent
  • Mail::Sendmail
  • MIME::Base64
  • Safe
  • Scalar::Util
  • Storable
  • Text::Balanced (Necessary for searches within a blog)
  • XML::Atom
  • XML::Parser
  • XML::SAX

Web Browser

As Melody is a modern web application which uses Javascript and AJAX extensively, it requires a modern web browser. We strongly recommend the latest version of the following browsers. Browsers are free and easy to upgrade!

The Melody is tested and supported on the following browsers:

  • Mozilla Firefox 3.5 or higher
  • Google Chrome
  • Internet Explorer 8.0 or higher (Internet Explorer 6.0 is not supported)

Melody should work fine with other modern browsers, but is not tested with these browsers:

  • Safari 3 or higher
  • Opera
  • Chrome
  • etc.

 


Questions, comments, can't find something? Let us know at our community outpost on Get Satisfaction.

Credits

  • Author: Six Apart Ltd, Byrne Reese
  • Edited by: Violet Bliss Dietz
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