How to install Brage CM (Change Management) on Windows with XAMPP

Disclaimer

I am not going to go into how to secure your web server. This tutorial is going to be used for demonstrating how to get a Brage CM up and running. When ever there is a password I am going to use “password” as the password. I do this to make things easy. If you want to change things after the fact I highly recommend it!

Things to download

You are going to need to download these items:

1. Download XAMPP
2. Download Brage v0.1.0-RC1
3. Download Brage v0.1.0-RC1-Fixes
4. Download Adodb
5. *Optional* Download 7-Zip

*Note * You are going to need to make sure you have a program like 7-zip in order to expand the Brage files.

Let’s install Brage CM

Step 1 – Install XAMPP

This process is a simple Next, Next, Next installer. Anyone familiar to Windows should have no issues with this. If you are running Vista or Windows 7 you will most likely want to install XAMPP to “C:\Users\User\xampp” directory instead of the default “C:\xampp” location. If you have the UAC on it will not let you install to the root of “C:” The rest of the tutorial I will assume you installed XAMPP to “C:\xampp”

Step 2 – Copy the Brage files

Copy the brage files to: “C:\xampp\htdocs\brage”. Once that is done you will also need to copy the contents of the “Fixes” to the same directory. When Windows asks to overwrite any file just say “Yes to all”.

Step 3 – Copy the Adodb files

You must copy the contents of Adodb file to: “C:\XAMPP\Adodb”. You will need to create the “Adodb” directory.

Step 4 – Install Pear extensions

XAMPP is pretty good at installing the most common PEAR extensions so I’ve never had to install them before. To install the needed extensions you must open a command prompt and make your way to the “C:\xampp\php” folder. You will need to type these commands in order to get everything all up and running:

1. pear upgrade HTML_QuickForm – this will upgrade “HTML_QuickForm” & “HTML_Common”
2. pear install HTML_QuickForm_Advmultiselect

Here’s the output from my command prompt

Step 6 – Edit “config.php”

You are going to need to create and edit Brage’s “config.php”. Go to “C:\xampp\htdocs\brage\include” and make a copy of “config.php.sample” and call it “config.php”. This file is the main config file for Brage.

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** NOTE ** I have create a seperate post called “What the brage config file should look like”. If you copy it’s contents put it into “C:\xampp\htdocs\brage\include\config.php” you will not have to change anything!

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For the rest of you that like to follow along and understand what to do here’s what I did:

Line 28 – Changed it to:

$conf['adodb'] = 'C:/xampp/Adodb/adodb.inc.php';

Line 45 – Changed it to:

$conf['smarty_path'] = 'C:/xampp/htdocs/brage/include/classes/Smarty/libs/';

Line 50 – Change it to:

$conf['smarty_templates_dir'] = 'C:/xampp/htdocs/brage/templates/';

Line 56 – Change it to:

$conf['smarty_compile_dir'] = 'C:/xampp/htdocs/brage/templates_c';

Line 61 – Change it to:

$conf['smarty_cache'] = 'C:/xampp/htdocs/brage/include/classes/Smarty/tmp/';

Line 65 – Change it to:

$conf['phpmailer_path'] = 'C:/xampp/htdocs/brage/include/classes/phpmailer/';

Line 71 – Change it to:

$conf['baseurl'] = 'http://localhost/brage/';

Lines 112-117 – Change it to:

$conf['dbtype'] = 'mysql';      # mysql, postgres, oracle etc..
$conf['dbhost'] = 'localhost';  # Hostname/IP of database server
$conf['dbname'] = 'brage';      # Database name
$conf['dbuser'] = 'brage';      # Database user
$conf['dbpass'] = 'password';   # Database password
$conf['dbport'] = '3306';       # Database port

Lines 151 – Change it to:

$conf['attachment_path'] = 'C:/xampp/htdocs/brage/attachments';

Step 7 – Create Folders

The last step we made the config file link to folder that didn’t exist yet. You must make sure that these folders exist.

1. “C:\xampp\htdocs\brage\include\classes\Smarty\tmp”

Step 8 – Make a MySQL User and Database

There are several steps that you are going to need to do:

1. Open a browser and go to: http://localhost/phpmyadmin/.
2. Click on the “privileges” tab.
3. Click “Add a new User” link.
4. Fill Out the form like so and hit go:
5. You should see something like this saying you are successful. 
6. You are going to need to import some items into the database to get Brage to work. Click on the “brage” database on the left hand side.
7. Click on the “Import” tab at the top of the screen.
8. Click Browse and select the file “C:\xampp\htdocs\brage\docs\brage.mysql”.
9. Click “Go” button.
10. You will see a confirmation that everything went well. Also on the left hand side there should be quite a few items now listed.

Step 9 – Login to the Brage Program

Go to http://localhost/brage/ and you will see something like this:

Following the documenation it says that the default user info is:

• User = “admin”
• password = “dolphin”

You should now be able to login to your software!

** UPDATE **

You will need to download admin_user.php so that you can create new users. You must save this file to: “C:\xampp\htdocs\brage”. The original file had a bug in it.