Download Notice Board

Notice Board is an open source notice board application written in PHP and MySQL. The application is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. A copy of the license is contained in the download file.

• Click here to download Notice Board

Installing Notice Board

As Notice Board is written in PHP and MySQL, it needs to be installed on a web server that supports these technologies. You can either upload and run Notice Board on a web server that is maintained by someone else, or you can install it on a web server running locally on your own computer. Installing Notice Board locally is ideal if you want to update the application yourself.

If you want to run Notice Board on your own computer, you can download software to enable you to set up a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment from several places on the web, for example www.en.wampserver.com and www.easyphp.org. It must be stressed though that for security reasons a WAMP environment is normally used as a development environment rather than a production one.

To install Notice Board:

1. Unzip the download file into a temporary location on, for example, the C: drive of your computer.
2. Using a text editor, for example, NotePad, open the file db.php. The contents of the file are repeated here for convenience:
   
   <?php
   # Name : db.php
   # Description : Include file storing the database connection information.
   # Author : JPD
   # Created : 06 Jan 2009
   # Updated :
   
   # MySQL Server Connection Constants. These can be changed here if the database is moved.
   
   $hostName = "enter hostname here"; // Address of the database server
   $databaseName = "enter database name here"; // Name of the database
   $dbusername = "enter username here"; // User name
   $dbpassword = "enter password here"; // Password
   
   # Example settings
   # $hostName = "localhost"; // Address of the database server
   # $databaseName = "notice_board"; // Name of the database
   # $dbusername = "root"; // User name
   # $dbpassword = "abcd1234"; // Password
   ?>

   The four lines that need to be changed are:

   $hostName = "enter hostname here"; // Address of the database server $databaseName = "enter database name here"; // Name of the database $dbusername = "enter username here"; // User name $dbpassword = "enter password here"; // Password

   If you have set up a WAMP environment yourself, you should know what these settings need to be. If you are planning to install the application on a web server maintained by someone else, ask them what the settings should be.

3. When you have updated the settings, save db.php (do not change the name).
4. Upload/copy all the files from the temporary folder in which you unzipped Notice Board (including the sub-folders and their contents) to the location on the web server where web pages have to be located. This name of this location will normally be called something like 'www' or 'public'.
5. Run the script 'create_db_and_tables.sql' to create the database and tables, and populate the tables. This needs to be done on the web server where the application will be running. If you have not called your database 'notice_board' (see step 1, above), you will need to change both occurrences of notice_board (in create_db_and_tables.sql) to the correct name of your database.

   If you are using an existing database, rather than creating a new one, you must remove from 'create_db_and_tables.sql' the line that reads:

   create database notice_board;

   The way in which you run this script will depend on where the web server is located. It may well be that you have a program such as phpMyAdmin available to you, or you might need to run the script from within a DOS window (for a WAMP environment).

php.ini

In most situations, the php.ini file will be already configured to be able to handle Notice Board. However, we have found that from time to time, a couple of settings need to be amended. If you have access to the php.ini file, ensure that the following configuration parameters are set accordingly. If you do not have access to the php.ini file, you will need to edit the Notice Board source files. If you need help with this, see Help and Assistance below.

Language Options

In Language Options, change:

short_open_tag = Off

to:

short_open_tag = On

Error handling and logging

Error handling and logging should be set to:

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE

Starting Notice Board

1. Make sure that the web server (Apache) and the database server (MySQL) are running.
2. Using a web browser, browse to the file called 'index.php', which is the Notice Board home page.
3. Register yourself as a Notice Board user and start adding items.

Help and Assistance

If you are having problems installing or using Notice Board, please feel free to contact me at john@dixondevelopment.co.uk and I will try to help you.

JDT