phpMyChat Tutorial and Installation How To

This tutorial describes how to use the phpMyChat chatroom software with your NEXCESS.NET web hosting account. NEXCESS.NET specializes in hosting phpMyChat chatrooms and this tutorial is meant to help you quickly setup your site with our web hosting service.

phpMyChat is open source, meaning that you can use and distribute it as you'd like as long as you don't change it.

For the sake of this tutorial we'll assume that you own the domain 'johnsmith.com' and are setting up phpMyChat at http://johnsmith.com/phpmychat/.

Follow these steps to complete the tutorial:

1. The first thing to do is to run through the SiteWorx MySQL tutorial and create a database for phpMyChat to use to store the information it needs.

   Create a database called 'phpmychat' with a user named 'phpmychat'. When you do this SiteWorx will prefix the database and user names with some text resembling your domain name.

   With our example domain of 'johnsmith.com' the database name is 'johnsmit_phpmychat' and the username is the same 'johnsmit_phpmychat'.
2. Download the latest version of phpMyChat from the phpMyChat website and unzip the contents of the zip file to your desktop using http://winzip.com. You should now have all the files and folders you need to install and run phpMyChat. Rename the 'chat' folder to 'phpmychat'.
3. Upload the 'phpmychat' folder to your web hosting account. You should do this using an FTP Program. If you need help with FTPing files, you can check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. Once all the phpMyChat files have finished uploading, we need to change the permissions on one of the files so the script can write to it. You can do this using the CHMOD command in your FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. You need to CHMOD the 'config/config.lib.php3' file to 666.
4. Now we can access the install wizard. In this example, we'll point to 'http://www.johnsmith.com/phpmychat/setup.php3'. You should now be on the first page of the phpMyChat installation. You have the option of setting up phpMyChat manually, but for this example we'll choose to use the wizard. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click on the 'Go' button to begin the phpMyChat installation. You should now be on the database information page. Enter the information for the database that you created in step #1. For this example, we'll enter the information as follows:

   • Select your SQL server type: MySQL - Stays the same.
   • Hostname of your SQL server: 'localhost'
   • Logical database name on that server: 'johnsmit_phpmychat'
   • Database user's login: 'johnsmit_phpmychat'
   • Database user's password: 'mypassword'

   All the other values can stay set to the defaults. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'OK' button to continue. You should now be on the fine tuning page. If you receive any errors, go back and make sure you entered the correct information for your database. You can choose to edit the values on this page according to your preferences. For this example, we're going to leave all the values set to their defaults. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'OK' button to go to the next page. You should now be on the Administrator registration page. Fill out the fields according to your preferences to create your admin account that you will use to manage your phpMyChat. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'OK' button to create your phpMyChat admin account.
5. You should now be on the config file page. In the text field in the middle of the page, you should see a value that says '*** Complete Here ***'. Select this value from the first star to the last star and enter in the password for your database that you created in step #1. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Now we need to create a new config file and then upload it to overwrite the old one. To do this, first you need to click the 'Highlight all' button to select all the text in the text field. Once the text is selected, we're going to copy it and paste it into a blank text file. Hold the CTRL key and press the 'C' key to copy the text. You can now let go of the CTRL key. Open your favorite text editing program and then hold the CTRL key once again and press the 'V' key to paste the text. You can let go of the CTRL key. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Save this file as 'config.lib.php3' on your desktop and then use your FTP program to upload this file to the 'phpmychat/config' folder to overwrite the old 'config.lib.php3' file on your web hosting account. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. Your installation is almost complete. You should now remove the 'setup.php3' file and the 'install' folder from your webspace for security purposes. You can do this using your FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page.

   Once all of that is finished, you can access your phpMyChat login page. For this example, we'll point to 'http://www.johnsmith.com/phpmychat/'. Enter the username and password you created. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Choose which room you would like to chat in and the click the 'Chat' button to begin chatting! The phpMyChat web hosting tutorial is now complete. Your screen should look like this:

   

   For more information on how to use phpMyChat once it's installed, check out the phpMyChat Mailing List.

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