Last Update: Mar 2024
About Oscailt
-------------
Oscailt is a PHP/MySQL content management system (CMS). It was originally written for Indymedia Ireland and for a few years was used by several
other Indymedia sites. It can be configured to be used as a generic publishing site and has many features, all of which are detailed in the
the HTML file oscailt_4x_features.html in the documentation directory of the Oscailt svn and now included with each release. It is also
accessible from the project home page at: http://www.indymedia.ie/oscailt/
Release Details
---------------
This README file lists all the releases of Oscailt from 3.0 onwards. For details of installation or upgrade instructions, see below.
For details of the changes in each release, please read the releasenotes.txt file which lists any new features added or bugfixes made.
If you already have an Oscailt installation, you will probably want to follow the upgrade instructions to migrate
from each release to the next. Otherwise if you are new to Oscailt or just want to do a new install, then you
should follow the 'Full Installation Instructions' below.
Oscailt 4.3.1 version.
----------------------
See the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-4-03-01/UpgradeGuide_4-3-1.html
For Oscailt 4.3 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-4-03/UpgradeGuide_4-3.html
For Oscailt 4.2 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-4-02-01/UpgradeGuide_4-2-1.html
For Oscailt 4.2 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-4-02/UpgradeGuide_4-2.html
For Oscailt 4.1 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-4-01/UpgradeGuide_4-1.html
For Oscailt 4.0.1 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-4-0-01/UpgradeGuide_4-0-1.html
For Oscailt 4.0 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-4-0/UpgradeGuide_4-0.html
For Oscailt 3.9 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-09/UpgradeGuide_3-9.html
For Oscailt 3.8 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-08/UpgradeGuide_3-8.html
For Oscailt 3.7.2 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-07-02/UpgradeGuide_3-7-2.html
For Oscailt 3.7.1 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-07-01/UpgradeGuide_3-7-1.html
For Oscailt 3.7 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-07/UpgradeGuide_3-7.html
For Oscailt 3.6.2 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-06-02/UpgradeGuide_3-6-2.html
For Oscailt 3.6.1 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-06-01/UpgradeGuide_3-6-1.html
For Oscailt 3.6 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-06/UpgradeGuide_3-6.html
For Oscailt 3.5 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-05/UpgradeGuide_3-5.html
For Oscailt 3.4 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-04/UpgradeGuide_3-4.html
For Oscailt 3.3 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-03/UpgradeGuide_3-3.html
For Oscailt 3.2 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-02/UpgradeGuide_3-2.html
For Oscailt 3.1 version, see the upgrade instructions in the file oscailt/upgrades/upgrade-3-01/UpgradeGuide_3-1.html
Oscailt 3.x & 4.x versions.
---------------------------
See the full install instructions below as there is no upgrade path from Oscailt 2.x
Installation Requirements:
--------------------------
Before carrying out a full install, ideally you should have an Apache web server on some variant of Linux or Unix,
The latest version of Oscailt 4.3 can be used up to MySQL 8.0.x or MariaDb 10.11.4 and PHP 8.2.8 For earlier versions of Oscailt see the table
in the features HTML file oscailt_3x_features.html or oscailt_4x_features.html which lists the MySQL and PHP versions for each release.
Summary:
1. Apache Web Server installed
2. PHP installed -up to PHP 8.2.8 for this release
3. MySql installed -up to MySql 8.0.x or MariaDb 10.11.x for this release
4. You must create an (empty) database schema in MySQL that Oscailt will use to create its tables and setup user and password
in the config/dbconfig.php file
5. If you are making use of email notifications, then your server should have some sort of email software preinstalled.
The latest version of MySQL database is called Maria Db although you may wish to still use MySQL 8.x versions.
Full Install Instructions
-------------------------
For release v3.8 a new Install and Configuration Guide has been written which expands on the summary of install instructions here and is applicable for
versions 3.8 onwards
This more complete guide can be found at either the SourceForge page for Oscailt or at: http://www.indymedia.ie/oscailt/
1. Copy the contents of the html directory in the Oscailt release zip file to the destinaton on the web server.
2. Create an empty database schema in the database. For MySQL the SQL command is: CREATE DATABASE database_name CHARACTER SET = latin1;;
You will need to get the password set for the account and if it is not your own database then to get the Db administrator to do it.
Command is of the form: CREATE USER 'oscailt_user1'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
And followed by granting privileges: GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON oscailt_db TO 'oscailt_user1'@'localhost'
Ensure the database character set is latin1 as this is compatible with ISO-8859-1 in the PHP code.
Ensure the database collation is latin1_swedish_ci which is compatible with the character set.
3. Edit config/dbconfig.php to set the database host address, database name, username / password etc and ensure the db user
already exists. To create and grant the correct permissions to it, use the MySQL command:
GRANT ALL TO *.* identified by '<password>' where the password is the one set in config/dbconfig.php
Make sure no extra blanks appear in this file after the PHP terminating tag on the last line of the file.
4. Edit the Apache file .htaccess to allow access to the install.php script. Alternatively this may be elsewhere in the Apache config.
5. Load install.php in your web browser -> follow the instructions.
The install will create additional directories and create the necessary database tables. It provides the option
to import an existing site template. It will offer an option to load a basic site template into the database,
create a default editor called 'admin' and build the site cache files.
6. When finished installing, be sure to remove the file install.php or remove its entry from .htaccess file.
7. Go to admin.php and then to the admin configuration page (editconfiguration.php) and configure the site URL and site name.
8. Go to admin.php to do other admin stuff like setting up other users and permissions via Edit Editors and Edit Roles
9. If no site is imported, then do basic configuration first. Add site language, story types, topics and regions and
then move onto the site objects. For this consult the User Guide.
10. Optionally update the CSS style sheet to change the colours, alignments, fonts, spacing etc of text, links etc.
These can be edited through the admin.php area via the Edit Default Style Sheets
11. index.php is the site itself.
12. If using RSS feeds, Oscailt expects curl to be installed at /usr/local/bin/ -this path is in the file snoopy.inc
For further instructions / help see the Oscailt User Guide.
Note 1: For first time install, you SHOULD always use one of the template sites offered.
Note 2: During the installation on the last step, you may see a warning about failing to parse OML. You can ignore
this warning. It may be due to an incorrect URL used to gather the Indymedia cities listing.
Note 3: If you are using the TinyMCE HTML editor or the OpenWYSIWYG HTML editor then ensure that you have installed
these separately in the html/tinymce and html/openwysiwyg directories and ensure permissions are correct.
Note 4: Only the ISO-8859-1 character set is supported by Oscailt. This covers most European languages.
Therefore UTF-8 is not supported by Oscailt and the database character set should not be set to UTF-8 but to latin1
Note 5: In MySQL 5.x onwards when used with Oscailt 3.6.x or less the value of the database global variable 'sql_mode'
must not have set NO_ZERO_DATE or NO_ZERO_IN_DATE or ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY. For more info see the MySQL manuals
For pre Oscailt 3.6 it was necessary for EVENT_TIME and STICKY_TIME in the STORIES table to be zero or empty to
ensure they were not set. Later versions of Oscailt allow these columns to be NULL.
Note for Windows Users.
-----------------------
If you are installing under Windows, the PHP function 'is_executable' which is called at line 197 in the file
html/objects/magpie/snoopy.inc is not available in Windows and will cause execution to terminate at that point.
This will cause step 5 of the full install which builds the object caches to fail. To get around this problem
just add the line:
return false;
before the if statment (line 197) which contains the above call. This should solve the problem. This is partially
fixed in Oscailt 3.2 by trying to avoid calling this function.
For shared memory, the file objects/memorymgmt.inc dummy functions have been created for the following:
sem_get()
sem_release()
sem_remove()
sem_acquire()
These are NOT available under Windows and therefore these dummy versions of these at the start of the above file
need to be commented out to allow the code to work since it is assumed they are available and most working sites
are likely to be hosted on some Linux/Unix varient.
If you are using CURL for imported feeds you may need to download the CURL binary and update the path to it in the
PHP file objects/magpie/snoopy.inc
General Note for Shared Memory
------------------------------
The shared memory extension 'shmop' must be loaded in PHP and the Semaphore functions like 'sem_get' must be enabled
for shared memory to work. The Semaphore functions are normally enabled through a compile option when the PHP library
is built. These settings are displayed in the configuration screen.
Oscailt Documentation
---------------------
1. This README file
2. The upgrade guides (see upgrades directory)
3. The release notes (see releasenotes.txt).
4. The User Guide (Oscailt_4x_UserGuide.html)
5. The Installation Guide (Oscailt_4x_InstallConfig.html)
6. Design documentation
7. Oscailt Features (see oscailt_4x_features.html) in the documentation release or in (formerly cvs) svn on sourceforge.
The documentation can be found under the SVN source control on the http://sourceforge.net/projects/oscailt/ page
You can also find links to the documentation at: http://www.indymedia.ie/oscailt/
Oscailt Modified Version of XSPF Player
---------------------------------------
The Fabricio Zuardi XSPF embedded flash audio player has been modified for use with Oscailt. This is available as
a separate release to the main Oscailt codebase. However from Dec 2020 flash this is no longer supported by browsers.
Embedded Flash Audio Player v1.0 -Aug 2010
------------------------------------------------
This is the first release of the modified Fabricio Zuardi XSPF embedded flash audio player. To install this, just follow
the instructions in the release file.
Known Problems
--------------
Known Problems with Retrieval of Indymedia City Listing
-------------------------------------------------------
If you specify the use of HTTPS in CityListing object for retrieval of the Indymedia IMC list, it will expect
to receive a SSL certificate that it recognises and it will fail otherwise. To get around this problem, use
HTTP instead. The URL for the IMC city list is: http://contact.indymedia.org/oml.php
Known Problems with Oscailt 3.0
-------------------------------
1. When you have installed your site, you may get the following error:
database error : 1054 - Unknown column 's.story_id' in 'on clause
This is caused by a compliance problem with SQL and some earlier versions of MySql. The solution is to download
version 1.9 of the file storyquery.inc from the Oscailt sourceforge CVS directory which can be found here:
http://oscailt.cvs.sourceforge.net/oscailt/oscailt/
2. Sometimes when editing a story or comment it fails because the story or comment id somehow gets set to zero.
Known Problems with Oscailt 3.1
-------------------------------
1. When you install the software and the cache is being rebuilt it may fail especially on Windows machines. This
is because the function: is_executable() which is called in snoopy.inc is not supported by Windows, and PHP
will terminate at that point. The solution is to take the latest version of this file from the Oscailt CVS.
2. Problems staying logged in and accessing the administraiton screen. On servers with PHP 4.x there is a problem
where sessions are not being set. This is caused by low level errors and output being sent before the session
is started. This can be caused by extra characters appearing in any of the include file after the final closing
PHP tag. This has been found to be the case in dbconfig.php. To solve this remove any characters including
blanks and linefeeds after the closing ?> tag.
Known Problems with Oscailt 3.2
-------------------------------
1. If you have friendly URLS for document objects, they may not convert properly to the new types when you try
to edit them. This is fixed in the next release.
Known Problems with Oscailt 3.3
-------------------------------
1. Installation problem creating the translations table.
Known Problems with Oscailt 3.4
-------------------------------
1. Blocking of embedded cover images not working correctly with configuration
2. Public edits introduced in 3.2 breaks publish form.
Known Problems with Oscailt 3.5
-------------------------------
1. There is a PHP syntax error in objects/feed_utils.inc that causes it to fail in PHP 5.4. To solve this download
version 1.4 of the file from cvs on sourceforge at http://oscailt.cvs.sourceforge.net/oscailt/oscailt/
2. The installation check in the administration configuration screen fails when it reaches the check for the
Suhosin package. The code shoud have checked for FALSE. See later versions but do not download later versions as
they will be incompatible with Oscailt 3.5
3. Public edits may fail if as default for session.use_only_cookies is set by default and changes where session is
found.
Known Problems with Oscailt 3.6
-------------------------------
1. There are two syntax errors in the code in files publiclist.inc and itemaction.inc. These are fixed in Oscailt 3.6.1
2. This and earlier releases are NOT compatible with php 5.4 because of the change made in php 5.4 to character set default used in htmlspecialchars function.
Known Problems with Oscailt 3.6.x
---------------------------------
All previous versions including the 3.6.x versions are incompatible with PHP 5.5 because the mysql_ API has been removed
and replaced with the mysqli_ API. The next version v3.7 will use the newer API making it compatible with PHP 5.5 onwards.
1. There are two syntax errors in the code in files publiclist.inc and itemaction.inc. These are fixed in Oscailt 3.6.1
Known Issues with Oscailt 3.9
-------------------------------
1. In the publish form the 'use HTML' box should automatically be ticked whenever HTML tags are added to the contents but are not and will
strip these out on the next preview unless intentionally ticked.
2. There is no API available from either BitChute or Brighteon to retrieve embedded video cover images automatically.
FireFox Issues from mid 2013
----------------------------
Since mid 2013 Firefox was updated to be more strict about mixing of 'schemes' which means if a page is read with
https then it expects any other references to images, javascript, css files etc to use the same scheme -i.e https.
Prior to Oscait v3.6, this scheme mixture could happen. So it is possible perfectly working installations started
failing after Aug 2013 approximately. The advice is to upgrade to Oscailt 3.6.
Known Issues with Oscailt 4.2
-----------------------------
1. The editor login session expiry is not updated from the initial logon leading to early premature logout. This is fixed in release 4.3
2. CSS vulnerabity identifed by third party fixed in release 4.2.1
Known Issues with Oscailt 4.3
-----------------------------
1. It is not recommended to use this version because of a serious bug when adding or saving configuration data. Use 4.3.1 instead.
Download Latest Version
oscailt432.tar.gz (10.5 MB)
