Help please. I am totally new to XOOPS and have had a day of struggle trying to get as far as I have. Following many attempts to install what I hope will be the answer to my prayers, I have managed to get the home page up.

I clicked on Administration Menu to start getting to grips with waht XOOPS can do and got a pretty green toppes but otherwise blank screen that says "This is your first time to enter the administration section. Press the button below to proceed." It tells me "Logging you in. If this page does not reload click here" and then just reloads the same pretty green-topped but otherwise blank page that says......!!

I tried all sorts of ways to arrange the files in my top directory on the site, with varying results. The first time was great. I put everything from the HTML folder on the top directory. The install went smoothly until I clicked on view your site here. I got the log in boxes and a few boxes where graphics wouldn't load. Only one gave me any clue and showed it was looking for an image in a directory I had moved. There after I tried every combination of file positioning and read pages of forum postings.

I now have all the files exactly as unpacked (ie in a folder called xoops-2.0.5) with an HTML page pointing at the index.php file. It makes the URL ugly but it will do while I play with XOOPS and see if it does what I need. I though that had fixed it.

Help

In your xoops/html folder there is a folder called cache. You have to make sure the system can write in this folder (UNIX CHMOD 777), in order to write the admin menu file. If that file is not there, it gives the green 'first time admin' screen.

Herko

It got a green light as writable on set up. Any other ideas? Looking at wiki I thought it might be because I have a personal firewall. Switching that off made no difference. Could there be a problem wit the path to the Cache folder perhaps? All my other problems seemed to be associated with files being in the wrong places.

Thanks in anticipation

Tried allowing the HTTP Referrer in your software firewall (if any) for your site?

Thanks. I am not quite sure what you mean by "HTTP referrer" in my software firewall. I have Norton IS and the host server is in the trusted zone. However, even with the firewall disabled I still can't see it.

Edit:

Hey thanks I think I have sorted it. It seems to have been my firewall that needed a little extra tweaking.

Now I have got that far can you tell me how to change the mainfile.php permissions so it's not writable? I am new to all this UNIX stuff.

Cheers

Edit 2:

Nope. Wrong again. I have to have my firewall etc disabled to do anything, the site having reverted back after a while. Even with it turned off I can't get stuff to function. For example trying to add a module I was told it couldn't write to the main directory. Now efforts to change preferences have resulted in blank screens. Going back to preferences all the changes were puntuated by #oops#.

Despair is setting in. I am not sure I have the patience to mess wih this! PostNuke worked fine for even a duffer like me, but XOOPS has so much more to offer...! Can anyone help with the basics I must be fouling up or will I have to live with the compromise of PostNuke?

This might be a completely irrelevant experience (since I'm not using Unix), but anyway: I had a similar problems even though the little green 'all is well' lights were on.

The files/directories that the installer asks you to make writable etc - in my case they were writable by the owner, but not by 'group' or 'all users' - and it just wouldn't go - until I made them writable to all three levels and then everything was fine (I set them via ftp in internet explorer)

Hope that helps somehow.