Web Auction Installation Instructions

System requirements

  1. PHP 4.3 or higher (Safe mode must be turned off, and short tags turned on)
  2. MySQL 4.1 or higher

Before you can use WebAuction, you need to set up the database and make some changes to the conf.ini file.

License

Step 1: Create the MySQL database & MySQL User

Please create a database in your MySQL server where WebAuction can store its data. Also create a MySQL user account that WebAuction can use to access the database. This user account should have full access privileges to this database.

Step 2: Create database tables

Please run the following MySQL commands to set up the Web Auction database. (You can copy and paste these commands directly into MySQL if you like).

Step 3: Update conf.ini file

Please update the [_database] section of the conf.ini file so that it reflects the connection information to the database that you just created for WebAuction.

Step 4: File Permissions

  1. Make the templates_c directory writable by the web server. This is where the Smarty templates are cached.
  2. Make the tables/products/product_image directory writable by the web server. This is where the images for the auction products will be stored.

Step 5: Log In

At this point, your web auction installation is available here. You can log into the administration section here with username admin and password password.

Troubleshooting

Support

If you run into problems with the installation, please visit the WebAuction forum.

Common Problems

I get a blank page when I try to access the auction script
If your PHP installation is configured to suppress errors in the browser, then any error will result in a blank page. Your first troubleshooting step should be to find out what the error is by either:
  1. Checking your error log. (Error logs may be located anywhere, but a common location for Linux distributions in /var/log/httpd/error_log). If you have shell access you can read the last few lines of the error log with the command:

    tail /var/log/httpd/error_log
    .

    If you do not have shell access then you may be able to access your error log through your web administration panel. Please check with your hosting provider to find out how to access the error log.

  2. Turning on display of errors in your browser. You can do this by adding the following line to the beginning of the index.php file (after the opening <?php tag):

    ini_set('display_errors','on');
    error_reporting(E_ALL);