Its really interesting when you try to install a software package on a variety of platforms. I just tried PBooks on FreeBSD, and it failed at first - without providing much insight into why. This revealed some needed improvements to Nexista, mostly minor error reporting issues.
Once I did get it running, I ran into some obvious things like using <?php instead of just <?. All in all it was a good experience, I’ve still got more patching to do! 
As of this morning, I’ve pretty much got PBooks running on FreeBSD / lighttpd without issue. As I said earlier, much of the difficulty was with nexista and the nexista project template, not with pbooks per se. I still need to do more testing, but that is something that needs to be done anyway. In particular, various test scripts need to be written. I’ve got a few tests for pbooks written, but they are very basic and just test the basic functionality like logging in and clicking on links. My goal is to fully test the accounting parts of the program, to ensure that the transactional data is being handled accurately.
PBooks Installation Form
This process has also alerted me that I will need to do more testing on various platforms, and to do so I need to improve the installation process. I’ve started a form to collect the necessary data, like database host, name, user, and credentials, as well as the information for the new administrator. But after that, I’m still undecided on how to handle that information. It is usually managed in the config.xml file, along with a lot of other settings like paths and debug switches. Should I write the configuration data to the config.xml file, or should I post it back to the user in xml format for them to copy and paste into the file?
For my purposes, it doesn’t help me much to do the latter, so I’ll try for the former, as that will be easier for end users in the long run. To do so, I’ll need to form the XML string from the content the user submitted, then write that to the config file. Beyond that, I think I’ll put the creation of a custom user on hold for now and continue to use the demo user which is still in the sample sql file. I’ll take the quick and easy route - use tokens to act as placeholders in the default configuration, then replace them with the user-submitted values.
UPDATE:
PBooks is now running great on FreeBSD / lighttpd / MySQL / MDB2! I’m tempted to try another database, but I’m doubtful it will work right away.
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