Opus FAQ

Nothing.

However you do need somewhere to host your web site if you can't host it yourself and that will cost you a little. In the UK prices seem to be from around £20 upwards per year. ISPs where we know people have successfully installed Opus include UK Shells and 34SP.

The minimum requirement is a web server running PHP and MySQL. As far as we're aware the only web server it has been run on is Apache (both 1.3 and 2) but you only need Apache if you want to use the optional URL re-mapping feature.

A web browser which accepts cookies. All the popular browsers do, just make sure you've got it turned on (it is by default).

Your ISP has configured PHP to run in "safe mode" so Opus can't use mysqldump to extract the data or gzip to compress it so you either get a zero length file back, or nothing at all. We are intending to write a free standing back up facility soon but in the meantime use whatever backup facility your ISP is offering you, probably phpMyAdmin (we have instructions here for using this).

It may be that your ISP has configured PHP to run in "safe mode". You need to ask your ISP to enable safe_mode_GID for your account and if they will place a copy of pdftotext in the safe_mode_exec_dir directory on their server. We have more on this here.

In order for URL re-mapping to work you need:

• A .htaccess file in your base directory which is writable by your web server.
• Apache configured to allow .htaccess to turn on mod_rewrite. Check that the AllowOverride directive in httpd.conf is set to something sensible, ideally to All

We have a separate page on this here.

The Cambridgeshire Community Network uses the e-Government Metadata Standard for its meta data so the changes we have made to Opus in support of that should make this easy but we will have more on this as this evolves. For now have a read of our page on using Opus with the Cambridgeshire Community Network and then see how you get on. Remember that Opus is an Open Source product so please share anything new you discover about using Opus with this standard.

Use the nested parameter in your <ol> tags. See the "Nested Ordered Lists" section of the Using Mark Up chapter of the Author Manual.

There is a tradition for Open Source projects to have recursive names e.g. GNU which stands for Gnu's Not Unix and in the same way Opus is short for Opus Publishing System. Opus is also the penguin in Bloom County a comic strip by Berkeley Breathed which Paul Oldham, who wrote most of the original Opus code, used to read avidly.

This quote on the home page was shamelessly stolen from the web site of Opus International Consultants "a leading international consultancy for infrastructure, architecture, construction, water, environment, asset development & management solutions" although whether it sounds like they might have got it from a passing dictionary.

Because before it became Opus the engine was originally called "V-Pump", short for Village Pump, but "Opus" won in the end. This is also why the cookies start "vpump".

Largely because all the obvious TLDs had long since gone. The .cx domain belongs to Christmas Island, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean and 60% of the income from running the domain goes to the Christmas Island Information Economy Development Trust.

It's hosted on The Hug's own colo server, a User Mode Linux virtual machine provided for us by Bytemark Hosting.