OSSN v6.1 new user install experience

Rich Evans Posted in General Discussion 2 years ago

Hello, I just learned about OSSN about a week ago and today I just finished installing and tweaking a fresh instance of v6.1 on my personal webserver and I wanted to share my thoughts and ask a few basic questions about the way OSSN currently behaves.

Environment:

  • Host: DigitalOcean
  • Centos7
  • Apache 2.4.6
  • Haproxy 1.5.18
  • Firewalld 0.6.3
  • PHP 7.4.26
  • MariaDB 10.6.5
  • OSSN 6.1
  • OSSN Theme: Fake-book 6.2

Note - My entire LAMP stack is managed via Meza [1] which is an ansible project that configures and deploys a fully-featured (media)wiki-farm server and all supporting components including the OS. While meza is not designed for any other web applications, it was straight-forward to create a dedicated virtualhost for OSSN to run along side all the wikis.

Install challenges

  • mod_rewrite Test - The mod_rewrite test in the installation check page was a problem. I knew mod_rewrite was enabled, but there is something wrong with the way OSSN gets the site_url at this stage. I think this was primarily due to apache running without SSL behind the proxy server handling the SSL termination. As a result, I think the OSSN installation was getting http://127.0.0.1:8082 as the site_url at this stage. I was easily able to defeat the check by editing installation/classes/OssnInstall.php and making sure that public static function is_mod_rewrite() always returns true .. that was fun.
  • blocked:mixed-content - Once I was able to get past the pre-installation tests I was able to configure OSSN. Setting the database, Admin account, and other essentials was straight-forward, but once the site was configured and it was time to visit the welcome page, I found that the site was failing due to mixed (http and https) content being served. This was remedied by editing the value of $Ossn->urlin configurations/ossn.config.site.php to be https rather than just http due to the site_url issue (presumably).
  • too many redirects - Once the mixed-media issue was cleared-up, the welcome page failed with the message too many redirects. This was tricky. I spent a few hours trying to fix this in .htaccess to no avail, but then discovered (in a discussion here) that there is a javascript function called ossn_redirect_absolute_url() in libraries/ossn.lib.javascripts.php that performs redirects for a variety of reasons.. to this function I hard-coded $baseurl to be my application url and edited all the of the $redirect = true; occurrences to $redirect = false;. And that solved the too many redirects problem.

After that, OSSN worked as intended.

Questions about standard behavior:

  • Regarding Groups

    • Secret Groups? - I noted that the only two options for group privacy are: public, and closed. Is there a way (component) that allows for secret groups?
    • Invitations to a group - is there a way to invite friends/users to a group? or do they have to make the request?
    • Group Photo Albums - Is there a way (component or otherwise) to add albums in groups?
  • Regarding Photos

    • Upload Progress indicator - I noticed that when uploading multiple photos that there is no progress indicator. Is this normal/expected?

Concluding remarks
I'd like to extend a very heartfelt thank you to the OSSN development community. Bravo. This is nearly perfect for what I have been hoping to do in 2022 to create a private social media site for my close friends and family. The ability to have a facebook-like application that is entirely free of advertisements and 100% controlled by the users (me and mine) is exactly what this world needs. I'm looking forward to contributing to the code as I can and as time permits.

Truest thanks,
/Rich

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meza
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Wnlt4b0nt0dpfzd7

Replies
in Balamurali Govindan Replied 2 years ago

I have http to https forward. I have seen this too many redirects, but rarely. Do I have to do the same as Rich has done? Please suggest. Thank you.

us Rich Evans Replied 2 years ago

Sure. I'd be happy to.

us MAURICE TAYLOR Replied 2 years ago

Im learning this do you mind if i ask you questions when i need help ?

Indonesian Arsalan Shah Replied 2 years ago

You can just download the component. I am not sure which subscription you meant :) Regarding JS handler yes someone need to write it. That is the only one way I see so to handle the upload via XHR and then to find the progress of it :)

us Rich Evans Replied 2 years ago

Ok. That makes sense. Thank you! .. For future posting attempts, what are the current rules for posts?

And thanks for the link to the group invitation component .. I'm waiting for my subscription to be approved so I can check it out (I'm sure it's perfect!)

Also.. regarding the JS handler for photo uploads .. is there a JS handler component or are you inviting me to write one? :-)

/Rich

Indonesian Arsalan Shah Replied 2 years ago

Thanks for posting here, due to abuse in past and spam we restricted the discussion length and added some other rules, Maybe Some rule triggered for your post.

ossn_redirect_absolute_url The redirect loop occurs if you have setup a traffic forward from http to https and on OSSN config there is a different protocol like http instead of https causing the issue :)

Secret Groups, OSSN only have two options to create a third option of course you would need to edit OssnGroups component.

You can invite member https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org/component/view/3305/group-invitation

Group albums, not possible right now the only way is to add single photo to group.

Regarding Photos : This can be created by adding a JS handler for upload!