As promised I will walk through the technical details on installing Piwigo. Actually surprisingly little technical insight is really needed, or at least would have been needed if just some small details were not left out of the installation guides for these products. These are the steps:
1. Install Apache (or another web server, if necessary)
My iBook had Apache 1.3 already running. Not new, but good enough, skip to next step.
2. Install PHP.
My iBook is running MacOS X 10.4, and an installation of PHP 5.2.4 can be found at http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/.
Goes like a breeze this. Checking that the installation went well: http://mrwalker.redirectme.net/~haha/phpinfo.php.
3. Install MySQL.
Installation of MySQL 5.1 for MacOS X 10.4 can be found at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html. But here is the snag: The download link for PowerPC has been unexplainably removed! I wasted hours here, not realizing I had installed an Intel-only build. The installation package just silently does its thing saying nothing. The “real” downloads for my system could be found hidden away at http://downloads.mysql.com/archives.php?p=mysql-5.1&v=5.1.40.
Now everything installed (again…) and even worked!
After installing MySQL use a terminal window to check it:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql test
Now (at least) set a password on the MySQL master account:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password your_new_password
4. Install some MySQL GUI to create and maintain your databases. Use this to create a database for use with Piwigo, you can call it anything you like. I can recommend Sequel Pro which worked nicely for me.
5. Install Piwigo.
Piwigo has a NetInstall which is easy to use. Except that it does not actually tell you that you do need to CREATE a database first. It does NOT do this automatically for you. Well, we did this in step 4 above. You can find the NetInstall at http://piwigo.org/basics/installation_netinstall.
6. Start using Piwigo. You would probably want to download pLoader to load your database with images. Find your pLoader at http://piwigo.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=15846.