Semantic Scuttle is an open source social bookmarking system and a further development from Scuttle. Some well known hosts uses Scuttle, e.g. Alltagz.de.

In this short tutorial I will give a short description how to install Semantic Scuttle.

For the installation you need an account with PHP and MySQL. It seems that there are also other database-systems supported but I didn’t tried to install on a different database than MySQL.

Installation

1. Download Semantic Scuttle form Sourceforge.net, at the moment the latest version is 0.89
2. Extract the Zip-File and upload the files to your web-server
3. Import the file “tables.sql” to your database. With phpMyAdmin this is quite simpel.
4. Rename the file “config.inc.php.example” to “config.inc.php” and open it with your favorite editor.  This file contains all basic information about your system

Settings in “config.inc.php”

Basic Settings

$sitename           = 'SemanticScuttle';

Name of your site, will appear in the header.

$welcomeMessage     = 'Welcome to SemanticScuttle! More than a social
bookmarking tool.';

Welcome-message, will displayed above your bookmarks.

$root               = NULL;

Leave here “NULL” if your installation is not placed in a sub folder, otherwise you should write here the url to your installation e.g. “www.yoursite.xx/subfolder/”.

$locale             = 'en_GB';

Here you can set the language of your installation.

$usecache           = false;

The cache-system, for now we leave “false”.

$dir_cache          = dirname(__FILE__) .'/cache/';

Path to cache, leave the preset value.

$cleanurls          = false;

This is for setting “nice urls”, for now leave it with the default “false”.

Database

$dbtype = 'mysql4';

Choose the type of your database, leave mysql4 for MySQL.

$dbhost = '127.0.0.1';
$dbport = '3306';

For over 99% of all installations the default settings are good.

$dbuser = 'username';
$dbpass = 'password';

Place here the username and password for your database.

$dbname = 'scuttle';

The name of your database.

$tableprefix = 'sc_';

Prefix of the tables in your database. If you imported the file “tables.sql” than leave the default.

User

$adminemail         = 'admin@example.org';

This emails-address is used if a users has lost his password and is requesting a new one.

$admin_users = array('admin');

Until now there is no user but here you should already put in your login-name. If there are more than one admin use:

array(’name1′, ‘name2′, ‘name3′);

$reservedusers      = array('all', 'watchlist');

Which words can not be used for usernames.

Antispam

For registration there is a simple antispam-question.

$antispamQuestion = 'name of this application (no Caps)';

The question, e.g. =’What is 2 plus 3′;

$antispamAnswer = 'semanticscuttle';

The answer, e.g =’5′;

The rest of the file is not important at the moment, we want to have a running system quick.

1. Save the file “config.inc.php” and upload it to your webserver.
2. Browse to your installation. If everything is OK you will see:

Start page of Semantic Scuttle

Register as user

Now you should register yourself as a user. Click on the link “register”.

User-registration

Fill the form and click the button “register”. This will lead you to the startpage logged in as a user.

Start page logged in as user

Add Bookmark

Now we want to add a bookmark to your fresh Sematic Scuttle, click on the link “add a bookmark”.

Add Bookmark

On this page “add bookmark” you find some useful tools. At Bookmarklet there are two useful links for quick bookmarking. Especially the version (Pop-up) I like very much. Drag and drop the link to the toolbar of your browser and you can easily add bookmarks to your Semantic Scuttle.

Popup add Bookmark

At Import you have the ability to import Bookmarks.

Fill the required information in the form, after clicking “Add Bookmark” you be redirected again to the start-page.

Semantic Scuttle with the first bookmark

You saw, it is quite easy to install Semantic Scuttle. In the next days I will write something about further adjustments of Semantic Scuttle.

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