Guide: Setup

Prerequisites

To use KISSCMS you'll need a computer running PHP5. Apart from that it should operate in any OS environment with most server software.

Download

Full source code is available from the Github repo. Simply navigate to the Code section and download the software. For the shell geeks this can also be achieved with the following console command:

wget http://github.com/makesites/kisscms/tarball/clone

Note: It is advised that you download the latest tagged release as the master branch may contain a lot of experimental code.

Installation

The basic setup process, which is for a new website in its own domain, requires only two steps:

• Extract the archive in the folder where you want your new website to live.
• Configure your web server to point the web root of your domain to the "html/" sub-folder (FAQs#3)

At this point, bringin up your website in a browser should reveal the default template of KISSCMS. You can continue from there, updating the interface to your own theme, deleting the dummy data (FAQs#4), installing plugins or creating your own custom logic.

For more advanced setups, like using a BASE folder, relocation the data folder or installing in a sub-directory you should also:

• Open "html/index.php" in a text editor and make sure all the paths are valid.
• Additional mod_rewrite configuration may be required. (see below)

Following are the configuration options available when editing this page.

Configuration

By editing the "html/index.php" page, KISSCMS can be customized to function according to specific needs.

Folder Locations

These PHP constants define where the main parts are located:

• APP
• BASE
• DATA
• WEB_FOLDER
• TEMPLATES
• PLUGINS
• CDN

In addition, you can specify use the flag IS_LOCALHOST to define different paths for your development environment.

mod_rewrite

To create search engine friendly URLs KISSCMS is using mod_rewrite to redirect all requests back to index.php

This can be configure via .htaccess or httpd.conf on an apache server.

In some cases, namely when your website operates from a subfolder of your domain, you may need to edit the mod_rewrite commands to point to the right location of the index.php.

In an .htaccess file update this RewriteRule with the value of WEB_FOLDER:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /{WEB_FOLDER}/index.php/$1 [L]