Omeka Install issue & resolution

I was tasked with setting up a test Omeka Server for our Library Archivist, based on the installation section on the site this should take about “five-minutes” give or take.

What is Omeka

Omeka is a free and open source collections based web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators, and cultural enthusiasts. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability.

What are the minimum and the recommended specifications?

• Linux operating system
• Apache HTTP server (with mod_rewrite enabled)
• MySQL version 5.0 or greater
• PHP scripting language version 5.2.4 or greater (with mysqli and exif extensions installed)
• ImageMagick image manipulation software (for resizing images in Omeka)

Direct Link to Omeka Documentation
http://omeka.org/codex/Documentation

Omeka Plugins
http://omeka.org/add-ons/plugins

Installation
http://omeka.org/codex/Installation

http://digin.arizona.edu/files/omeka.pdf


The above instruction goes under the assumption that you already have a LAMP environment in place. Since I haven’t done a LAMP setup in quite some time I did a google.com search and landed on one of my favorite tutorial site http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_lamp_for_newbies.

One small issue I encountered and how I resolved it

After doing the LAMP setup and following both guides under the installation section, I connected to the web server URL http://server and instead of displaying, I was prompted to download a file “index.php”.

Back to google.com…After searching going through the various Apache configuration folders and directories, I realize that I needed to add the below configuration to the bottom of the mime.conf file just above the last "<\IfModule>" closing tag.

Steps taken:

Logged into the Linux Web Server and made the following changes;

ituser@TestSrvr:/$ cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
ituser@TestSrvr:/$ sudo nano ./mime.conf

Open IfModule mod_mime.c

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

AddType application/x-httpd-php .phtml
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php3
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php4
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps
Close IfModule

Reference --> http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=7584

Restarted apache “sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart” and I was ready to rock-n-roll!