Serendipity Tutorial and Installation How To

This tutorial describes how to use the Serendipity weblog software with your Nexcess web hosting account. Nexcess specializes in hosting Serendipity software and this tutorial is meant to help you quickly setup your site with our web hosting service.

Serendipity 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 Serendipity at http://johnsmith.com/serendipity/.

Follow these steps to complete the tutorial:

The first thing to do is to run through the SiteWorx MySQL tutorial and create a database for Serendipity to use to store the information it needs.
Create a database called 'serendipity' with a user named 'serendipity'. 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_serendipity' and the username is the same 'johnsmit_serendipity'.
Download the latest version of Serendipity from the Serendipity website and unzip the contents of the zip file to your desktop using http://winzip.com. You should now have a folder on your desktop with all the files and folders you need to install and run Serendipity.
Upload the 'serendipity' 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 the Serendipity files and folders have finished uploading, we need to change the permissions on the 'serendipity' folder in order for the script to 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. CHMOD the 'serendipity' folder to 777.
Now we can access the 'index.php' page. In this example, we'll point to 'http://www.johnsmith.com/serendipity/'. You should now be on the first page of the Serendipity installation. You should see a message from Serendipity saying that it isn't installed yet. Your screen should look like this:

Click the 'install' link to continue. You should now see the Serendipity installation page. We'll start out with the 'Database Settings'. In these fields we'll put in the information for the database we created in step #1. For this example, we'll enter the information as follows:
- Database type: mysql - Stays the same.
- Database host: localhost - Stays the same.
- Database user: johnsmit_serendipity
- Database password: mypassword
- Database name: johnsmit_serendipity
- Database prefix: serendipity_ - Stays the same.
Your screen should look like this:

Scroll down to the 'Paths' section. All the paths should be correct. Look over them and make sure that they are. Your screen should look like this:

Scroll down to the 'General settings' section. Fill out this section according to your preferences. Your screen should look like this:

Scroll down to the 'Appearances and options' section. Fill out this section according to your preferences. For this example, we're going to leave the values set as the defaults. Your screen should look like this:

Scroll down to the 'Imageconversion Settings' section. You don't have ImageMagik installed on your server so you should leave this settings as is. Your screen should look like this:

Click the 'Check & save' button to continue.
Serendipity should now be installed without any problems. If you receive any errors, go back and check to make sure you entered all the correct values on the settings page. Your screen should look like this:

Click the 'right here' link to continue. You should now be on the main Serendipity screen for your blog. Your screen should look like this:

If your screen looks different, click the 'Refresh' button on your browser to reload the page. Scroll down the page and click on the link under 'Superuser:' to access the login page. Enter the username and password you created for your admin account. Your screen should look like this:

Click the 'Login' button to access the Serendipity admin control panel. You can now customize and manage your blog as you see fit. The Serendipity tutorial is now complete.
For more information on how to use Serendipity once it's installed, check out the Serendipity Forums.