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Installation
Before you can install Sporum, you need to know the requirements described in Sporum info.  If you finished installing the requirements, it is time to start building the main Sporum package:  

Uncompressed Sporum:  
Untar and uncompress the sporum compressed file using a program like 'tar' into your CGI directory.  

Set Permission:  
Set the file permission of all the cgi file to 755.  

Verify Perl Path:  
The first line of the cgi #!/usr/bin/perl is the absolute path location of Perl. Most servers follow this path for Perl. But your server may be configured differently. If so, you have to replace a correct path with the path on each of the cgi file in order to run Sporum properly.  

Configure Sporum:  
Manually edit the variables in ./SmallPigVars.pm and ./Themes/default/theme.pm to suit your configuration needs.  
                                      
Create Database:  
Once you have changed the values and saved SmallPigVars.pm, you can create the database for Sporum. Its name should correspond to the default name you use in SmallPigVars.pm. Also, make sure you know the database names are case sensitive under UNIX system.  

Grant Privilege:  
Be sure that you have a user for that database which has the rights to select, insert, update, delete, create, alter and drop. A MySQL Grant statment for this user would look like this: 

                                   GRANT select, insert, update, create, alter, delete, drop 
                                   ON database.* 
                                   TO user@localhost 
                                   IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; 

where database is the name of the database you created, user is the name you specified in SmallPigVars.pm and password is the password you specified in SmallPigVars.pm.  
                   
Create Tables:  
Sporum has a variety of tables it must access in order to function properly. To import the tables file into the Sporum database on the local machine, simply run: 

                                   ./mysql/createtables.pl 

Create Administrator:  
Access this page http://sporum-directory/default.cgi?dpage=createadmin, and enter the account information to create a new administrator. After creating the first user(administrator), remember to delete the "createadmin.temp" file located in "templates" directory and "createadmin.cgi".

Administration Menu:  
Once you have registered a username you can go to the administration page(eg. admin.cgi) to create new boards, assign moderator and the like: 

  • Create new categories and boards: you will see the "Create Category" and "Create a New Board" options.  Think about what boards you want and begin adding them. 
  • Choose Moderators and add group members: After the boards are created, you can assign anyone who have a user account as a moderator.  A group private board is not open to public.  You can tell Sporum who can enter the board, and only those users are allowed in.  You can let the moderators to take on this task, or do it by yourself. 

  •  
    Customize the Layout: 
    You can customize the layout by editing the inc files in includes directory.  If you are familiar with perl, you can also embed some perl script within those files.   

    Adding Crontab Entries:  
    Sporum uses UNIX cron facility to expire the outdated threads, delete the unused file attachments and inactive users, and send forums subscription messages periodically. First, you need to edit four files (deletefiles.pl, deleteusers.pl, delivermessages.pl, expirethreads.pl) by changing the path that will be inserted to @INC: 

                                       unshift(@INC, "/usr/local/apache/perl/sporum"); 

    And then create a crontab entries using the crontab command. Before adding crontab entries, you need to modify the path to reflect the correct location of those four scripts *.pl mentioned above. You can executes the command as below, the file expirethreads.cron will be installed as /var/spool/cron/crontabs/username: 

                                       crontab sporumcron 

    Congratulation:  
    If everthing is working, your Sporum installation is complete. 

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