help me move my tiki

October 9, 2008 10:46 AM

Questions about TikiWiki and web hosting - how can I improve web resources for my grad program?

So I've inherited my graduate student association's website (maintenance of). It's built on TikiWiki groupware/CMS and hosted on my university's server. For various reasons, there's a high level of interest in "migrating" it to an external server, registering our own DNS, and getting some email addresses with the domain name extension. I have a background in online but I'm not a programmer and my experience with DNS/that sort of thing is more or less limited to about one day of research (I do, however, have plenty experience using various sorts of arcane CMS's). Of course, all of this has to be done on a very limited budget.

My tentative plan is to get hosting services from nearlyfreespeech.net, because it would be dirt cheap, and then use gmail as our mail provider, which will allow us to set up email addresses with our domain extension (right...?). However, I'm trying to figure out if nearlyfreespeech.net will support/be compatible with TikiWiki requirements.

Will I be able to migrate our TikiWiki to their servers? And approximately how much would it cost for a year of hosting, if we did do it (traffic being minimal)? I've posted in the TW forums but haven't received any answers. I'm open to other possibilities.

More broadly, I'm interested in good ideas for a graduate program website and web initiatives - what gets people involved? What have people found useful?

posted by scribbler to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Webserver: What I ran at NFS & responses - command:
php5 -r "phpinfo ();" | egrep "max_execution_time|max_input_time|memory_limit"

Response:
max_execution_time => 0 => 0
max_input_time => -1 => -1
memory_limit => 32M => 32M

I think the only problem there is that the PHP execution time is 180, & the execution times in general are about there. I'm not sure what this affects in TikiWiki.

Libraries: Stuff mentioned in phpinfo: mysqli, libxml, mbstring, ctype - hang on, let me just install it & see if it complains about something that's missing.

Okay, I installed it, with permissions providing the only hitch. It's not complaining, though it's at the default - no extra features enabled. Should I look for a particular needed feature?

For cost: how much storage & how much bandwidth do you use? Storage is $10 per gig per month, & bandwidth is $1 per gig to start with, dropping from there.

The broader stuff is likely better as a new question, because I'm fairly sure no one else made it down this far in the post.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:33 PM on October 10, 2008

Thanks.

The only features we're using right now are the wiki and the calendar. I'm not sure how much storage and bandwidth we use - we'd only be hosting the Tiki, and I imagine traffic would be very low. No major uploads of content or pictures or anything. It's a bit sticky because I don't have any access to backend server-side stuff on the current website... BUT this looks like it would work. What's the hangup with the permissions?
posted by scribbler at 8:31 AM on October 15, 2008

I installed via ssh, downloading & unpacking the tarball. The only (slight) hitch there was making a directory writable with, I think, "chmod 777 directory/", & the configuration web page may have suggested the appropriate command, I forget.

Nearlyfreespeech also handles DNS registration well, by the way.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:35 AM on October 15, 2008