1. UCenter 1.5.0 安装介绍
2. UCenter Home 2.0 安装方法详细介绍

Here’s what I want to achieve: setup UCenter Home 2.0 on a dedicated linux server.  And since installing UCenter Home is a 2 step process of installing UCenter first and then UCenter Home, I break it into 2 posts.  This post covers installing UCenter.  In next post I’ll talk about UCenter Home.

Setup UCenter

UCenter is the pre-requisite of installing UCenter Home 2.0.  UCenter stands for “User Center” and is the integral part of Comsenz’ products.

First, download the installation package at http://download.comsenz.com/UCenter/1.5.0/UCenter_1.5.0_TC_UTF8.zip.  Here I choose the Traditional Chinese edition with UTF-8 encoding.  Under the root’s shell, issue the following commands to download and unpack the installation package.

mkdir ~/setup-ucenter
cd ~/setup-ucenter
wget http://download.comsenz.com/UCenter/1.5.0/\
UCenter_1.5.0_TC_UTF8.zip
unzip UCenter_1.5.0_TC_UTF8.zip

I would like UCenter Home to be installed at http://u.tcpo.org.  Because UCenter and UCenter Home cannot be installed under the same directory, I decided to put UCenter under http://u.tcpo.org/ucenter.  The document root of the domain u.tcpo.org is /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org in my server.

mkdir /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org
cp -pr upload /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org/ucenter

Then I need to change permission to some files and directories to allow read/write by apache.

cd /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org/ucenter
chmod 777 data
chmod 777 data/avatar
chmod 777 data/backup
chmod 777 data/cache
chmod 777 data/logs
chmod 777 data/tmp
chmod 777 data/view

Next, I need to configure apache so that it responds to virtual host u.tcpo.org.  The following section is put inside /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName u.tcpo.org
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org
        CustomLog logs/u.tcpo.org-access_log combined
        ErrorLog logs/u.tcpo.org-error_log
</VirtualHost>

Then restart apache.

service httpd restart

I also need to prepare a MySQL database and a MySQL user because running the UCenter installation guide.

CREATE DATABASE UC;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON UC.* TO "uc"@"localhost" \
  IDENTIFIED BY "<password>";
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Now I can visit the UCenter installation site at http://u.tcpo.org/ucenter/install.  A license agreement will be shown, click “我同意” to proceed.  After that, a step-by-step installation guide will guide you through the setup procedure.

1. 開始安裝

This step checks the server configuration to see if it meets UCenter’s requirement.  If everything’s fine, you will see everything “ticked”.

2. 安裝數據庫

Here I enter the database access information.

數據庫服務器: localhost
數據庫名: UC
數據庫用戶名: uc
數據庫密碼: <password>
數據表前綴: uc_

I also need to setup a 創始人密碼.

3. 安裝數據庫

You should see messages saying that database tables are successfully created.  If not, check your database access parameters entered in step 2.

Now UCenter is completely setup.  You can use the 創始人密碼 to login into UCenter 用戶管理中心 to have a look around.

“在这里要说明一下：我们提供了 4 种不同的编码。包括 GBK 简体中文版(推荐)、UTF-8 简体中文版、BIG5 繁体中文版(推荐)、UTF-8 繁体中文版，请自己的需求选择相应版本的论坛程序下载。”

It means the author recommends installing the package using GBK/BIG5 encoding instead of the UTF8 one.  It confuses me as I thought the UTF8 version is be more appropriate for general use.  I have friends writing in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, so UTF8 is a requirement for me.  To confirm whether UTF8 version is worse than its GBK/BIG5 peers, I download all packages and diff them.  The result is comforting, as the only output is of the following type:

<               <option value=”0″>Flash动画</option>
<               <option value=”1″>Media视频</option>
<               <option value=”2″>Real视频</option>
—
>               <option value=”0″>Flash動畫</option>
>               <option value=”1″>Media視頻</option>
>               <option value=”2″>Real視頻</option>

So if you are struggling with version choice, you can safely choose the one that fits you the best.  In my case, it is the UTF8 version.

But why did the author recommend against the UTF8 version?  Well, I can think of 2 reaons:

1. UTF8 has characters in varied length.  If you are sure you only have GBK or BIG5, then it saves you some bandwidth using GBK/BIG5 instead of UTF8.
2. The author has a China-only mindset.

Well, reason 2 is further enhanced by the fact that UCenter has only Chinese documentation.