Adventures in ResourceSpace

Introduction to ResourceSpace

One disadvantage non-profits have, other than a huge battle for funds, is that they have fallen behind the times.

We live in a time where the not-so random numbers of 1 and 0, can save nearly countless hours, and costs on paper: however, I’ve seen few people in the non-profit world using this theory to their advantage. Take databases for example. Nearly every organization wants one, or has one, but few know that they could pull info such as names and emails out of them to use in a mass mailing with a few mouse clicks.

Today I am writing about a particular way non-profits can catch up in the category of media sharing. I’ve heard many times about the holy grail that non-profits seek-- a huge internet sharing of resources such as: volunteer opportunities, forms, names, solutions, videos, pictures, and more. It’s also been mentioned that it would be great to have this holy grail integrate with other systems or software such as office programs. Yet when it comes down to it no one has really made it. Sure there are sites out there that accomplish part of the tasks, such as 1-800-volunteer.org, but they cost money and many senior volunteers and non-profits find them confusing to use. (Personally I dislike 1-800 volunteer for several reasons, but chief among them, that their goal is to promote themselves more than the opportunities. The entire design of their web page seems based on that. Wholly they also broke the rule on keeping it simple for the users.) To actually build one though would take a lot of time and energy, luckily there is such a thing as open source software.

Many people have direct or indirectly heard of Open Source Software before, for those who haven’t essentially the software is free, some might have a few more strings attached to it than that, but not really. The normal conclusion to jump to when people hear of free software is that the software is a scam, fake, or not as good as something you could purchase. I am inclined to agree that lots of software on the internet can be bad, fake, and not as good as something someone can purchase, but there are some beautiful gems in this weird software world that rivals or conquers software that costs big bucks. A good example of some of the best open source software on the web is PHP and MYSQL. These two programs/languages can literally make the holy grail come true if someone took enough time to play with them (1-800 volunteer is built with PHP and MySQL). These two pieces of software are used by professional businesses all around the internet to create dynamic websites. Much of the internet runs on Linux servers, and Linux is an Open Source Software! Without diving into too may Open Source Software programs that are really great, the one I will be discussing is a Data Access Management System (DAM) called ResourceSpace.

A DAM is often confused with a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is normally a database that controls the content of something such as a website. A website CMS through database tables controls users, pages, who sees what, forms, saving information. Most CMS’s have a relatively simple Graphical User Interface GUI. A GUI is a series of pictures or texts that a user can click on to accomplish a task, much like the wizards in Windows. The GUI of most web-based CMS’s use their GUI to give people managing the CMS website the ability to manage: the site pages, its users, and content without, knowing any of the web programming languages that make up that website (however knowing a few definitely helps—A lot). A DAM is like the super hero of Content Management Systems. DAMs are advanced CMS’s focused on controlling data with a particular purpose, and sharing that data.

ResourceSpace is a DAM focused on cataloging and sharing media data such as pictures, PSD files, PDF’s, Office Documents, Videos, 3d Files, and more. It allows selected users to upload content, download content, edit content, sort content, and categorize content. The software itself has been used in the production capacity, or more specifically as a pipeline to share parts of a project. Simply this piece of software can be one part of the holy grail of sharing. The software is free, but finding the right place to put it on the internet, is not so free.

Sure there are free hosts out there such as byethost.com, that offer a basic free hosting package, but with most hosts there are bandwidth, space, and some security restrictions to consider. Having a website where people upload videos can take up all a websites normal allotted bandwidth and disk-space. It’s best to consider finding a webhost that offers unlimited bandwidth, and diskspace, or at least a large enough amount for the materials you may have.

Where to Get ResourceSpace, and what are its requirements?

The Resource Space software itself can be obtained freely from their website(http://www.resroucespace.org/) , but the software is not what most people expect, especially for computers running. The software itself is essentially a prebuilt website that requires third party software normally located on web servers in order to operate properly. When you initially download ResourceSpace it will be a zipped folder.

The zipped folder itself is composed of additional folders, sub folders, and text files that have the ending extension.php. Trying to open these individual files in your web browser will only result in confusing it. As mentioned before ResourceSpace normally requires software normally installed on a server (which most personal computers, regardless of where they are windows, linux, or an apple do not have). To practice with ResourceSpace on a personal computer instead of the internet another free Open Source Software called Xampp is needed that essentially gives your computer the ability to be a webserver.

How to Install ResourceSpace on a Personal Computer with Windows

Before ResourceSpace can be installed on Xampp needs to be installed. Xampp can be downloaded at http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html#641, make sure to choose the Zip installer in order to follow along with this document (the .Zip, not the .EXE). This may take a bit of time to download.

After xampp is downloaded, normally its supposed to placed in the root of a drive. For example your C:\ drive has many folders in it including My Documents, My Pictures, etc. These folder are all on the C drive inside other folders. The "term root of the drive" normally means that its one of the first folders in a drive, and not in a sub folder. The My Documents folder is not in the root of the C drive in Windows Vista but rather in its in the Users Folder Inside the Name(name of the user) folder, then finally the My Document folder can be found. The path of this folder is C:\Users\User Name\My Documents--so to properly install xampp you would normally extract the file by unzipping it first by right clicking on the folder and selecting the extract all option that appears.

After the folder is extracted (which may take a while unless you have 7-zip), the xampp folder would be copied to the root of a drive. Luckily, since we downloaded the zip, we do not need to follow the rules (except for the unzipping part).

Once the folder is unzipped inside the xampp folder locate the a file called xampp-control.exe, and double click on it to activate it.

Once this file is activated a small dialogue box will show up on the right side of the screen.

Click on the setup option located in the right hand corner of the dialogue box. This will open up a window, that looks very similar to the DOS Command line. This is essentially a wizard for installing xampp.

The first question the setup asks is if you'd like to create shortcuts at the start menu and desktop. Personally I like my xampp portable so i normally choose. If you choose Yes type in "y" on the keyboard and hit enter on the keyboard, if no type "n" on the keyboard and hit enter.

After you hit enter another question will appear saying: "Current directory does not match configured directory. I must relocate the xampp paths correctly." Type in "y" then hit enter on the keyboard.

The next question will ask: "Should I make a portable version of Xampp without drive letters?" Type in "y" and hit enter on the keyboard. After Enter is hit the wizard will start initializing xampp. After that xampp is ready to use.

Return to the Xampp Control Dialogue box, and click on the start buttons to the right of Apache, and Mysql (the rest can be left as they are).

This may may trigger windows firewall to prompt a block, however select the unblock option, it's doing this since the actual apache and mysql are not installed.

After this is startet you can click on the big red X of the dialogue box to close the control panel (do not click the exit button though), it may appear as a small icon on windows taskbar (the icons on the right of the start bar next to the clock).

then open your web browser and type in http://localhost/ (note if you have a 64bit version of windows you'll actually need to type in http://127.0.0.1/) in the address bar.

This will open up a Xampp Splash page to indicate that you installed xampp correctly (Note this page is not on the internet it's running off your computer). There is still a few things we need to do before we can install ResourceSpace. On the splash page select English as your default language. This will take you to the main xampp control page. From the option on the left choose phpmyadmin.

This will open a page call phpmyadmin. Essentially this internet based page is a GUI to control the Open Source Database Engine called MySql. We need to create a Database for Resource space.

In the center of the PHPMyAdmin page there is an option to create a new database. Type in a name (I used res_space" that has no spaces in it then hit the create button. All Done! (At least for what this tutorial is trying to accomplish). You can close the web browser for now.

Navigate to the Xampp folder (wherever you have it installed) and in that folder there is another folder called htdocs. This folder is the new home for Resource Space. Right click to make a new folder inside htdocs, and name this folder rs_space. Extract Resource Space and place all of its files inside the rs_space folder that was recently created.

Next re-open the web-browser and type in http://localhost/rs_space/ And you'll be directed to the Resource Space setup page. You'll more than likely see a warning that say there is an error with your php.ini file, namely the memory limit is set to 128M. PHP is the software used along with Java to upload file in Resource Space. Some files can go over 128M or 128 Megabytes. Video files can easily go into the hundreds of Megabytes. By not changing this to a higher amount you've restricted ResourceSpace's upload capacity. For testing purposes though this will work, and thus this tutorial will not discuss how to modify the php.ini (for people that do know how to do not use notepad, use notepad++, or wordpad otherwise you will get errors).

Next Choose American English as the language.

The next section of fields to fill in are called the database fields of these two fields on two need to be changed. Change the database name to res_space (its the name we gave the database earlier), and delete the "user/bin/" text in the MySQL Binary Path field

In the General Settings fields change the Application Name to whatever the website or part of the website would be. Fill in the From Email and the Support email (please note that we did not setup Xampp to do email, this is just to play with resource space by itself). Then copy the spider and scramble key, save them somewhere safe.

You'll a whole section of blank fields under the General Settings. These are third party (also free) software that ResourceSpace uses to automatically create:

• Thumbnail for Pictures with Image Magick
• GhostScript for PDF previews and tear aparts
• FFmpeg for creating video thumbnails and compressing them (similar to what youtube does)

These bits of software are not going to have their installation discussed in this tutorial, so leave the fields blank and click the Begin installation button. You'll then be directed to a Congratulations page.

The page also asks you to remove write protection from the "include" folder, but since we are just testing we won't (on the internet normally this is done through ftp programs such as Filezilla, another free Open Source Program).

At the bottom of the congratulations page there is a link to the site with a standard user name and password which are both set to admin.

When the link is clicked on the user name and password are prompted immediately. After entering them you are directed to the main page.

At the bottom of the page is a small gray bar, this is where your collection of uploaded files will appear, you can also minimize this bar by click on the hide thumbnails option.

The best way to really learn this program is to play with it, but to assist Next Time I will write about a little bit more of of its operations instead of simply its install But I would recommend checking out the Team Center button on the top left hand corner.

Have Fun!