Feedback on new SO Release for the Dev Team

[Kevin Britton, geändert vor 13 Jahren.]

I just learned about LifeRay about a week ago, and decided to try out Social Office as a potential replacement for my group's home-grown (and buggy) intranet.

For background, we're a US national service Fraternity with Chapters in 6 states. The primary features of our existing intranet are forums, chat, document storage, calendaring, helpdesk, and member profile storage. At any given time we have a couple of hundred active members in several sub-organizations.

I downloaded the new release of SO and got it working fairly quickly with the internal demo database. So far, it looks like SO does all of the above things VERY well. It's really a nice product -- congrats!

I did have (and still am having -- see other post) problems integrating with MySQL on my server. Once these are resolved, I'll be in a better position to judge ease of migration, etc.

My biggest concern with SO....and it might be enough to drive me back to the full-blown LifeRay, is the apparent lack of customization ability. I'm not seeing workable options in the demo DB for changing the SO logo, or removing portlets on the site home pages. For example, if I don't need a Wiki for a site (or Feeds, etc), I'd like to turn that off; but while I can blank these items, I can't seem to remove them completely. I also created a new user and then made a new site with that user, and I couldn't access a site-specific control panel on the new site with the less-privileged user. Perhaps I'm missing something -- time to reread the docs!

I've not had a chance to test the chat in a multi-user environment. Online meetings is a big part of our needs, so I'm hoping that's an existing functionality. Another key thing for us is managing mailing lists; since this is always server specific, I'm going to have to look at scripting something that can use built-in hooks. Anybody have to do this with their implementation?

Anyways, great product, team! If you could add back in some of the basic customization allowed in the full LifeRay portal, I think you'd have a home run!

[Hennie de Villiers, geändert vor 13 Jahren.]

I presume you are referring to SO 1.5B as per the Sourceforge website. This is effectively Portal 5.2.3. with SO portlet deployed. To play around and check the differences: stop the instance - move the so-portlet folder somewhere outside the social office install - start the instance again. You will need to apply other templates as some functions for the so-template are dependant on so-portlet running.

If you want to reset the data structure, you need to delete the HSQL folder that is located under ../data/. Liferay will automatically recreate the data structure.

I did have (and still am having -- see other post) problems integrating with MySQL on my server. Once these are resolved, I'll be in a better position to judge ease of migration, etc.

Integration with mysql is simple and straight forward. Make sure your permissions are set correctly in mysql and that you entered the correct info in the portal-ext/properties file. You wil fint this under ../tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes. If it does not exist you need to create it. see Database Config for details to enter. Use setup for 5.2.3.

[Kevin Britton, geändert vor 13 Jahren.]

Thanks for the reply! I kind of figured there was a way to de-couple SO from Portal, but I wasn't sure how, so I ended up doing a side-by-side install with Portal 6.0. I basically can switch back and forth by shutting one down and starting the other up. Kind of nice that way.

Hennie de Villiers:

Integration with mysql is simple and straight forward. Make sure your permissions are set correctly in mysql and that you entered the correct info in the portal-ext/properties file. You wil fint this under ../tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes. If it does not exist you need to create it. see Database Config for details to enter. Use setup for 5.2.3.

I've tried that, but haven't had any luck. In my case, I think I'm hampered by a socket connection. There must be something odd, configuration-wise, on our server because I've scoured the net and never found anyone who had more than the "simple and straight forward" instructions posted...

Can you take a look at my other post, which includes the error report, and see if anything jumps? Thanks!!

[Hennie de Villiers, geändert vor 13 Jahren.]

Did you create the mysql database as UTF-8? If not delete it and recreate as UTF-8.

Secondly make sure that the lportal users has all rights to the database.

If you previously started SO, then first delete the hsql data before firing it up to access the mysql database.

[Kevin Britton, geändert vor 13 Jahren.]

Hennie de Villiers:

If you previously started SO, then first delete the hsql data before firing it up to access the mysql database.

Maybe that's it -- I'll give that a shot tonight. Thanks!

[Hennie de Villiers, geändert vor 13 Jahren.]

When Liferay starts, wait a little as it populates the database. Depending on your machine and config it can take a couple of minutes.

I made the that mistake in terminating the session too early.

[Kevin Britton, geändert vor 13 Jahren.]

No luck with deleting the hsql data. I'm getting a "connection refused", which would seem to suggest that the mysql server isn't allowing the connection. I did some digging, and there are two mysqld settings (--skip-networking, and IP binding) that can make the server reject anything that isn't localhost, as a security measure.

In my situation, my hosting provider uses binding, to allow socket connections only from the local site -- I'm in contact with them to find out if there's any way around this.

[Kevin Britton, geändert vor 13 Jahren.]

Kevin Britton:

No luck with deleting the hsql data. I'm getting a "connection refused", which would seem to suggest that the mysql server isn't allowing the connection. I did some digging, and there are two mysqld settings (--skip-networking, and IP binding) that can make the server reject anything that isn't localhost, as a security measure.

In my situation, my hosting provider uses binding, to allow socket connections only from the local site -- I'm in contact with them to find out if there's any way around this.

And just to close the loop (per the other thread), we had to set the binding to the static public IP address for our account in order to get it to work.