The first time you visit your new ProofBuddy site after uploading you will go through a series of pages to get ProofBuddy ready to run on your server.
Welcome Page
There is nothing for you to do on this page other than click the Next button. It simply welcomes you to the setup process.
Permissions
ProofBuddy needs the ability to write to several folders on your web server. If you’re using a Linux server change the file permissions to 777 on the /cache/, /admin/cache/, /albums/, and /user/ folders. This will allow ProofBuddy to save files when it needs to.
If any of the green Success notices in the above image are red Fail notices it means that ProofBuddy cannot write to that folder. Having any of the permissions not set correctly will also cause you not to be able to go on to the next page until it is fixed.
Database Settings
ProofBuddy needs several pieces of information from you to be able to connect to the MySQL database. These are the database host, database name, username, and password. You should have these from when you created your database. If not you’ll need to check with your host.
It is important that the database is already created before you start the ProofBuddy setup. Most servers are not setup to allow scripts to create new databases but only modify existing ones so that is how the ProofBuddy setup is written.
Location
The location screen lets you easily add states to your database if you’re in the United States or Canada. If you are not in one of these two countries then select other and you will be able to add whatever states you need under the Options -> States menu once you have ProofBuddy setup.
Company Information
This is where you enter the information on your company, although anything entered here can be changed later.
One special consideration is the email address. This is the email address that orders will be sent to so you should enter an address that you will check frequently.
Admin User
The admin user is the account that you will use to login to your ProofBuddy site to work with albums. Like the company information you can edit any of this later and you can also create additional admin users once ProofBuddy is setup.
Again the email address deserves special consideration here. If you forget your username or password and submit to have a new password sent for your account this is the address that it will be sent to.
Config File
This is just an informational screen telling you that the config file has been created. If for some reason ProofBuddy was not able to save the config file the contents would be listed on this screen along with instructions for you to create in manually. However that shouldn’t happen as the permissions check on step 2 should have already checked for this.
Done
The last screen is just to let you know that ProofBuddy is now setup on your server and ready for use.
When you click on the Done button a small bit of information is sent from your server to our server with your domain name and versions of software that is setup on your server. This is optional and you can click on the link in the yellow box if you do not want to send this information; but having statistics on what versions of PHP, MySQL, the GD Library, and ImageMagick our users have on their servers helps us improve future versions of ProofBuddy.
What’s next
Now that setup is complete you can safely delete the /install/ folder from underneath the /admin/ folder. The files within the install folder are no longer needed and in theory can present a security risk.
After that, go to your ProofBuddy site, login, and get started setting up your albums.