Dave Chakrabarti Footnotes in Technivism

This may be of some use to those of you about to install CivicSpace. I came across an interesting bug in the CivicSpace installation process. Since I used the automated installer, I needed to navigate to (my domain name)/install.php to begin the installation process, after uploading all of my files (Note: Civicspace was being installed in my root directory, otherwise I would have had to specify the entire path through any sub-folders to the install.php file).

The installation directions say that the path you use to access the install.php file will be used to set all the paths for the site. What they fail to mention is that this means you have to decide whether or not you're going to use the "www" in the domain name.

Sounds minor, but it turned out to have consequences. I rarely type in the "www" part of a URL, so I typed in "nicat.org/install.php" on my install (I was installing the system for the Northern Illinois Center for Adaptive Technology). This seemed to work fine.

However, when I was working with the site a little more, I realized that the site wasn't the same if I accessed it with http://nicat.org or http://www.nicat.org ...the difference seemed to be that the former worked fine, while the latter wouldn't let me log in, or show any navigation options related to my status as an authenticated user. The problem persisted, even when I used "/user" to reach the login screen. Going back to www.nicat.org always got me to a version of the site that wouldn't let me log in, or show me as a logged-in user.

I smacked my forehead and assumed I was going to have to reinstall CivicSpace...a prospect that wasn't exactly appealing. However, an idea occurred to me before I went ahead and pulled the plug on my installation. I did a little reading online to figure out where Drupal stores its "base_URL" setting, to try and see if a simple hack would get my site working again.

It did. The solution: Use an FTP program or the file manager utility from your hosting provider to navigate to "public_html/sites/default/settings.php". This path will vary depending on your hosting situation of course, but in general, navigate to the root of your publicly available files on your webserver, and click on sites, then default, then settings.php (this may be a little different if you have multiple sites configured from the same Drupal install). I edited mine directly through the file manager, but you could also copy the file to your computer using an FTP client, edit it, and upload it to the same location again (overwriting the original version of the file). If you do this, make a backup copy (I usually call my backups something like OLDsettings.php and leave them in the same directory).

The settings.php file is fairly simple. There's a ton of documentation in the file itself, which is very nice to see...it explains exactly what the file does, and where to change what. About three quarters of the way down the page, you should see a line that looks like this:

$base_url = 'http://www.digitalraindrop.com';

(Of course, it'll have your website address instead of mine). This is a PHP statement that assigns the value of 'http://www.digitalraindrop.com' to the variable base_url, which is how Drupal knows where your site is located.

When I did this for my CivicSpace install, it had the base_url variable set to 'http://nicat.org' ...instead of 'http://www.nicat.org'. I changed it to include the "www" as part of the path name, saved the file, and checked my installation.

In the beginning, nothing seemed to have changed, but when I used www.nicat.org/user to log in, the system seemed to refresh, and everything has been working perfectly from that point onwards, regardless of whether I use the "www" or not when I'm accessing the site.