Multi-Blog platform LifeType 1.1 Available for Testing

By markusmBlogging

As written down in Development snapshots of LifeType 1.1 on 27. Apr. 2006 a new feature complete version of the  pretty nice multi-blog solution LifeType is available. Nightly snapshots are offered for testing purposes. In the article you will find more explanations and links. If somebody is looking for a multi-blog solution or an easy to setup blog-network using sub-domains on one server this is a solution I would recommend to look at.

If you don’t know LifeType (formerly known as Plog) … there are at least two big mediahouses in Germany realizing their attached blogs with LifeType: Financial Times Germany (ftd.de/blog/) and Burda/Freundin (http://blog.freundin.de/). But they for sure did some changes …

Basic info:

LifeType supports multiple blogs and users, media management,
generation of standard content, clean URLs and support for subdomains.
LifeType is released under the GPL license, and requires PHP and MySQL to work.

Basic links:

I have also installed it on/attached it to my site and it was pretty easy to start. The available templates are medium quality and the summary page for all blogs must be customized. It’s a good and stable multi-blog solution (speaking of 1.0.3).

Installation / Upgrade (don’t forget the backup :-):

In order to install this release, please use wizard.php as with
any release so far. If upgrading from LifeType 1.0.x to LifeType 1.1,
wizard.php will also take care of adding all new tables as well as of
making changes to currently existing tables. In order to upgrade from
an older development snapshot of 1.1 to a newer one, just upload the
newest files to the server and overwrite the old ones except your own
version of the configuration file (config/config.properties.php)

For your comfort … some of the LifeType 1.1 links:

That’s the newest info on LifeType.

PS: If you are running a  1.0.3 … there is an update to 1.0.4 available.

Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, LifeType, multi, blog multi-blog, Plog, update

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10 thoughts on “Multi-Blog platform LifeType 1.1 Available for Testing”

  3. If you are running a 1.0.3 … there is an update to 1.0.4 available.

    FYI:

    Important security upgrade: Lifetype 1.0.5 released

    4. Jun. 2006

    LifeType 1.0.5, containing a fix for a severe security issue, has just been released.

    Just yesterday the development team was notified of a critical SQL injection bug in all versions of LifeType 1.0.5 and we are happy to announce than in less than 24 hours, there is a new maintenance release fixing this issue. The issue should have not been there had the development team been more careful, but we tried to fix it as soon as humanly possible. We would like to thank ‘rgod’ for reporting the issue.

    Source:
    important_security_upgrade_lifetype_1.0.5_released

  4. I have no idea what happened to the original link but the article about the development version 1.1 is back at lifetype.net under a different href-id.

    This is the result of some (unnecessary?) email conversations 🙂

    Update: Oh, it’s an added dot in the link: development version 1.1

  5. … the linked article somehow got lost. I have informed the people at LifeType via mail:

    Hi everybody,

    it just happened that you published news about the new 1.1.dev-snapshots. What happened to that article?

    I wrote a nice little article about the new 1.1. on http://performancing.com/node/2381 and now the whole article has vanished.

    The middle column on your homepage also links to it but is empty.

  6. tmp and gallery directories are moved out of the LifeType directory (optionally) because of the ‘potential’ security issues. LifeType doesn’t write sensitive information into tmp or gallery. tmp is used only as a storage place for the pre-rendered page cache (static pages). gallery is used for media you want to present on your server.

    LifeType installation simply can not know how your database connection (!) configuration looks like. You reach the highest level of security with MySQL if no network connection at all is necessary (not even to localhost).

  7. Actually, what I was getting at for “database server” is whether the “http://” part should be include. I can figure it out by hacking, but it would certainly save people time to have an example in the source code/ docs. These are the kinds of things that WordPress has already covered, and that LifeType needs to.

  8. Markus, how patient you are for us pretend-dummies (real?). Thank you for the detailed notes. (I had a hard time finding installation notes.)

    I did read the part about setting permissions on the ./tmp file. I didn’t see anything about gallery. But the cryptic message doesn’t seem to relate to that. On the other hand, I’m not so hot on using 777 permissions. That’s bad design, and potentially dangerous. I am, however, trying with 775 permissions. I’ll try again.

  9. There is not too much info to enter?

    OK, because it’s you and you have published that wonderful interview you get my anonymous translated installation notes (I am sure that I have read LifeType installation instructions somewhere on lifetype.net):

    Installation for LifeType

    Login to server/SSH with Putty

    Create Root directory for LifeType for domain
    md lt/blogs
    cd lt/blogs

    Download LifeType
    (Attention: new version available)
    wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lifetype/lifetype-1.0.3.tar.gz

    Untar and copy LifeType tarball to root
    tar zxvpf lifetype-1.0.3.tar.gz
    cp -R lifetype-1.0.3.tar.gz/* . (Dot stands for ‘here’!)

    Free Access for LifeType tmp and LifeType gallery directories
    chmod 777 tmp
    chmod 777 gallery

    Move both open LifeType directories out of LifeType directory (because of security)
    mv tmp ../../tmp_stgi
    mv gallery ../../gallery_stgi

    Generate MySQL database for LifeType

    Start wizard.php for LifeType (my special part for Raj 🙂
    Insert data
    mapping ISP to LifeType wizard fields:
    Hostname -> Database server
    Username -> Database user
    Password -> Database password
    Databasename -> Database name

    Database prefix: lt_project_ (For LifeType ‘project’)
    !!! Do NOT mark “Please check this if you want the installer to create the database.”, because the database already exists! Translated for dummies ‘Do only create the necessary tables inside the already existing database’ or for the not soooo web savvy under us ‘Only fill up the existing data mug’.

    delete wizard.php
    rm wizard.php

    Delete LifeType archive (the tarball)
    rm lifetype-1.0.3.tar.gz

    config/config.properties.php Read Only
    chmod 444 config.properties.php

    And as Mr. Steve Pavlina said … “be web savvy” 🙂

  10. Interesting. The features look good, so I gave the software my “installing for dummies” acid test: how easy is it to install if you have very little tech experience?

    I just downloaded 1.0.4, uploaded it to a brand new domain, then tried to run wizard.php, and I have an error. The config file is a little sparse in comments, so the form of certain values (i.e., db_host) isn’t clear. I’m not sure if any blogger with no programming experience is going to be able to figure out the problem. And as far as I could tell (playing impatient devil’s advocate), I couldn’t find a main set of installation instructions.

    Not initially impressed, considering how easy (and functional) WordPress is. To be fair, it’s an early version, and in-source docs are sparse. But as I want some of the features LifeType sports, I’ll hack a bit.

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