2016-02-03 Update
I no longer use PluXml as a CMS/site. PluXml is a nice site but I’ve since found static site generators, in specific Nikola which fulfill my need, provide even lighter services, and provide an “admin UI” which I prefer (plain old MarkDown with raw html/js when I need it). Nikola is easy to setup, fast to develop in, and builds static html that can easily be deployed and load balanced without the need for cache servers and a lot of database tuning.
Background
PluXml is a light CMS/Blog Engine that uses XML files to store the CMS data rather than a typical RDBMS such as MySQL, Postgres, or Oracle. The main benefit of PluXml is that there is no database required, which makes it is a good fit small servers and/or virtual servers.
Details
PluXml is available in the debian (sid) repo; however, the server I am installing it on happens to be the only non-sid based debian distro I run. My solution (this may not work/be appropriate for your scenario) was to simply download the .deb from the sid repo and install it manually in my wheezy instance.
To do so:
wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/pluxml/pluxml_5.3-1_all.deb
dpkg -i pluxml_5.3-1_all.deb
You will get a log of the config files created during install, take note of the files. It should be similar to the following:
Creating config file /etc/pluxml/parametres.xml with new version
Creating config file /etc/pluxml/adminkey with new version
Creating config file /etc/pluxml/users.xml with new version
Creating config file /etc/pluxml/apache2.conf with new version
Creating config file /etc/pluxml/lighttpd.conf with new version
Configuration
I “reconfigured” PluXml as there are a few more items/settings that can be set here.
To do so: dpkg-reconfigure pluxml
Now you need to add the pluxml site to your Apache/lighttpd/nginx config. This is obviously dependent upon your server; however, configs for Apache and lighttpd are generated during the install (see the log above). I deployed in two different ways to illustrate a “simple” and “full” approach.
Simple Approach
Open your sites-available/default configuration file and simply add the following alias:
Alias /s "/usr/share/pluxml"
Restart your server service and you should be able to use PluXml by going to http://yourserver.com/s.
Full Approach
Open your sites-available/default configuration file and add all of the info from the /etc/pluxml/apache2.conf file into your default configuration file. Restart your server service and you should be able to use PluXml by going to http://yourserver.com/s.
Using PluXml
Believe it or not, this was the tricky part for me. I was able to bring PluXml up without an issue but I could not figure out how to log in to do anything! As you may know by know, PluXml is a French based product, porting to other languages is a recent addition to the project and there is not a lot of forum info available in English. I was mystified and had to take a night to sleep on it. The next day I dug back into this by scouring code only to find a comment about a patch that fixed a “full screen” error. Needless to say this enticed me to maximize the browser, at which time I saw the “Administration” text in the footer of the page which simply looked like branding text. That was the key and once I found it all was well (no, you do not need to maximize your browser to see it).
Simply click the Administration link at the bottom and you can log into your instance to customize, add users, and of course setup/add content to your blog!
