Perhaps the greatest aspect of phpBB3 is the ability to customize it by installing any of a number of available modifications. You’ll see a list of modifications later in the post, but first things first: Installation.

Unless you are familiar with the PHP coding language, installing these mods can be a daunting task. That’s where AutoMOD comes in! AutoMOD is a mod installation utility that will insert the necessary code into your phpBB3 site quickly and easily.

Five Steps to Install AutoMOD:

1. Upload all of the files and folders from the “upload” directory to your site with the FTP client of your choice. Ensure that you maintain the correct data structure, i.e., files in includes need to go in the includes folder on your site
2. Once the files are in place, browse to the install directory (http://www.yoursite.com/phpbb/install) to run through the simple and painless installation.
3. Don’t forget to delete the install folder from the server or phpBB3 will not allow anyone to use the site.
4. To install the mod, upload the mod files and let AutoMOD do the work!
5. After you upload your mod files into the newly created /phpbb/store/mods folder on the server, the mod will be displayed in the AutoMOD tab in the Administration Control Panel. Next to the name of the available mod is an “Install” link.

AutoMOD will check all of the code changes necessary and alert you if there is a problem; for example you may have already installed a mod that affects the specific code that the current mod needs to change. In this case, you will be shown the changes that are required for the current installation and you can make the choice to continue or cancel.

If there are any additional steps needed to complete the installation, AutoMOD will tell you exactly what’s needed. If you decide in the future that you don’t want the changes implemented by a particular mod, AutoMOD can remove it for you as well. How cool is that!

There are literally hundreds of phpBB3 modifications available. The official phpBB site hosts over 300 mods alone, all of which have been reviewed for security flaws and obvious bugs. You can transform phpBB3 from a simple bulletin board system into a feature rich content management system, a near LinkedIn clone, or even a blog.

Here are some of the more common and useful mods you may wish to look at:

• Advertisement Management: Manage your banner ads, create rotating ads & filter viewers of advertisements
• User Blog Mod: Feature rich blogging system that can be available to all of your site members
• phpBB Smartfeed: Creates RSS 1.0, 2.0, and ATOM 1.0 newsfeeds so you can syndicate your site contents
• SEO Mod: Optimize your phpBB3 site’s ability to gain ranking within search engines
• phpBB3 Portal: Add a front portal page to your forum, effectively converting phpBB3 into a full CMS

With all of these mods at your fingertips, the Internet is your oyster!

Cody Erekson
WestHost Technical Support

I think it is safe to say that the majority of computer users, at one time or another, and to one degree or another, has had that moment where we wished we had made a backup of our files—but hadn’t. I don’t believe that an in-depth explanation is required to illustrate why this is a good idea, and that we can all agree that this is something that we should periodically do to avoid that “I wish I made a backup” moment.

While it may seem obvious that you would do this on your personal computer; the files on your Westhost account are no exception. It is just as easy to remove or overwrite a file or an entire directory on your Westhost account. The frequency in which you do this is going to depend on your site; you must decide on the regularity that you perform the backup. There are multiple ways that you can perform the backup of your site, the easiest and most popular method I will describe below.

Site Backup

Take inventory of your account

This will give you an idea of what you are going to back up if for whatever reason you are unsure. The easiest way to do this is to access your Site Manager (http://yourdomain.com/manager) > Install & Manage Applications. This will give you a snapshot of the applications that you have installed and what you will be backing up.

Install FTP program

You are going to want to install an FTP program on your computer to download the backup that you will create. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is going to be the method with which you download your backup from the Westhost server to your computer. There are many FTP programs out there that you can use ranging from free to programs that you must purchase. For the purposes of this instruction, I will be using FileZilla as it is compatible with both Windows and Mac platforms. You can download FileZilla for free here.

To set up FileZilla, you will want to follow the Westhost documentation that has been provided here. Setup instructions for other FTP programs can also be found in the Westhost documentation.

Zip up site directory

It is possible to download the entire site directory file by file, but this results in long download times and is overall inefficient. The preferred way to back up your site is to “zip up” your site’s home directory into one single zipped file, and then download the one file. To zip up your sites directory follow these steps:

1. Open up the File Manager (http://yourdomainname.com/fm) and log in with your Site Manager username and password
2. Upon logging in, you will be placed inside your primary domain’s directory (/var/www/html). In order to zip up the /html directory, you will need to go up one directory (/var/www). You can do this by simply clicking “up one dir” at the top of the directory list.



3. It’s important that you are in this directory; otherwise, the below command will not work. Now that you’re in the appropriate directory, you will issue the zip command by first clicking “Execute a Command” at the top right of the screen.
4. Type in this command where it says Enter Shell Command:

   tar -zcvf yourdomain.com-YYYY-MM-DD.tgz html/



5. Hit Submit and this will initiate the backup process. This may take a while depending on how big your directory is. So don’t be alarmed if it appears as if it isn’t doing anything. When it is finished it will output a long list of files that it archived.

Download backup

Now that you have successfully zipped your directory backup, you are ready to download it. Open up FileZilla and connect to the server by following the instructions outlined in the Westhost documentation.

When you open up FileZilla, you are going to see a local side (your computer) on the left and a remote side (your server) on the right. By default you will be placed in the upper-most directory on your server “/” or what is known as the root of your server. You will need to browse to the location where the backup was made. On the top-right pane of FileZilla, browse to /var/www and you should see the backup that you created in the bottom-right pane. Simply drag the backup file (yourdomainname.com-YYYY-MM-DD.tgz) over to the left-hand pane of your FileZilla which is your local computer. This will initiate the download and, once again, can take awhile depending on how large the backup is. The progress meter at the bottom of the screen should give you an idea when the download will be finished.

Database Backup

The backup that we performed is going to back up your Web site’s files, but if your Web site uses applications such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or any other application that delivers dynamic content, you are going to have a database that you will want to backup as well. The databases that these applications use are going to store all of your blog posts, application settings, users, etc. Simply put, applications that use a database will not function without it. That said, it is equally important to back up the database as it is to back up the site files.

You will most likely already know if you have an application that uses a database after taking inventory of your site earlier on step one. If you have determined that you use a database, follow these steps to make a backup of the database. At any rate, it would be a good idea to follow the below steps to be absolutely sure that you’re backing up a database if you have one.

Install phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a database management application that will allow you to export your database. To install this (if not installed already), go to Site Manager > Install & Manage Applications. phpMyAdmin is going be under the Development sub section and will be highlighted blue if already installed. Once it’s installed, click on the phpMyAdmin name and it will give you a link to the phpMyAdmin login.

Once logged in (you will need to use your Site Manager username and password), you will see the main page for phpMyAdmin. On the left you will see a list of all your databases. From this list, you will be able to identify quite easily databases that your site uses (databases like mysql, test, and information_schema are there by default and generally don’t need to be backed up). To make a backup of each database, you will need to follow the below process.

1. Click on the database on the left
2. Click on Export (towards the top)
3. Scroll down to the bottom and check “Save as file”
4. Click Go (opens window prompting you choose a location to save the exported database on your computer)

This will export the database in SQL format which is the standard format for databases. Repeat this export for your other databases as necessary.

Once you have made the backup of your site files and the database, you can rest assured that you have something to fall back on if in case, you encounter one of the would-be “I wish I made a backup” moments.

Even to most Internet professionals, the Apache web server software can be as perplexing as it is ubiquitous. Although not as comprehensive as the official 685-page documentation, this post outlines two useful features you can enable in the httpd.conf file to improve the performance of your web server: persistent connections and gzip compression.

Important note: An error in your Apache configuration can take all of your web sites offline. Please make a backup copy of the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file before you begin making modifications. Also remember that it is necessary to restart your account to apply either of the changes described below.

Persistent Connections (Keep-Alive)

In addition to your web page itself, web browsers must also download each stylesheet, script, image, and other file referenced by your page. Historically, this meant that browsers would connect to a server, download the page, and disconnect. The browser would then initiate a new connection, download the first referenced file, and disconnect, repeating the process to fetch each additional file. As web pages became increasingly complex, they began using more files and the slow connect/download/disconnect method became noticeably time-consuming. This problem was solved with the introduction of persistent connections, as described below in the Apache documentation:

The Keep-Alive extension to HTTP/1.0 and the persistent connection feature of HTTP/1.1 provide long-lived HTTP sessions which allow multiple requests to be sent over the same TCP connection. In some cases this has been shown to result in an almost 50% speedup in latency times for HTML documents with many images.

Under the default settings, persistent connections are enabled on your account, but the KeepAliveTimeout is set to 15 seconds (near line 86 of /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf). This means that Apache connections will stay active for 15 seconds after visitors have downloaded (and possibly even left) the web page. Apache connections use server resources and your account has a limited number of Apache connections, so this is generally undesirable.

• For the best performance on most websites, leave KeepAlive On but reduce the KeepAliveTimeout to 1 or 2 seconds. This allows visitors to benefit from faster downloads through persistent connections, but helps prevent Apache from overloading the server and keeping too many connections open at once.
• In rare cases, on websites with extremely heavy traffic, turn KeepAlive Off. Persistent connections guarantee faster page loads for your visitors but come at the cost of increased resource utilization by requiring more Apache connections to remain open concurrently on the server. If you are frequently reaching the maximum number of allowed Apache connections, it is probably necessary to upgrade your hosting package, but turning off persistent connections is one final step you can take to squeeze a little bit more out of your current plan.

Gzip Compression (mod_deflate)

HTML, CSS, and many other programming languages used on the web are highly redundant, allowing them to be compressed effectively. mod_deflate, Apache’s compression engine, is installed but not enabled by default. To enable automatic gzip compression, add the following lines of code to the end of your httpd.conf file:


SetInputFilter DEFLATE
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/rtf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/atom+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rdf+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/postscript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/msword
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-excel
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-powerpoint
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddType image/svg+xml .svg


After you have edited the httpd.conf file and restarted your account, test whether compression is working properly.

Persistent connections significantly improve loading multimedia-rich sites with large numbers of images and other files, while gzip compression reduces HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other text by an average of 80 percent, but these two changes are just the beginning! Read Yahoo’s list of Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site for even more ways to make your pages load faster.

Changing Images

The first image you might want to get rid of is the main banner image and replace it with your own. The main banner is actually made up of two parts. The first part is the clouds image. This is referenced again in the CSS file that you have already edited. The CSS file looks like this:

#logoWrapper{
background-image: url(../images/header_bg.jpg);
background-repeat: repeat-x;
background-color: #ffffff;
height:75px;
}

To remove the clouds image, you simply removed the reference to the image:

#logoWrapper{
background-repeat: repeat-x;
background-color: #ffffff;
height:75px;
}

By default Zen Cart uses logo.gif for the name of this image, but you can use you own filename for the logo. Using an image editor, create your new logo and upload it to your server.

After creating your logo you can adjust the height, width and logo name in includes/languages/english/header.php. Also, you will have to change includes/languages/english/classic/header.php.

define('HEADER_ALT_TEXT', 'Powered by Zen Cart :: The Art of E-Commerce');
define('HEADER_LOGO_WIDTH', '192px');
define('HEADER_LOGO_HEIGHT', '64px');
define('HEADER_LOGO_IMAGE', 'logo.gif');

Make the needed changes reflecting the name of your site, and the width, height and filename of your logo that you created. To get rid of that pesky “Sales Message Goes Here” text, you need to modify the header.php file in the path /var/www/var/zencart/includes/languages/english/classic/ .
The rest of the images on the site are banners and those banners can be turned on, off, or deleted. You can do this through the admin panel for your cart. After your images have been modified, your cart should look something like this:

Congratulations, you are well on you way to creating a shopping cart that will fit your site’s personality.

—————————–

Would you like to perform the above (or more) on your site, but not comfortable with the code? WestHost can help, just fill out a request here.

Common things I often asked are how colors, widths, heights, and images are changed. The first thing I will start with is the overall color scheme of your store. Your store will look like this when it is first loaded.

Color Schemes

Many ask how to change the green color scheme. To do this, we have to modify the CSS file located in zencart/includes/templates/classic/css/ called stylesheet.css. The green headers are actually small gif images that are referenced in the CSS file. They can be deleted or changed. I have highlighted the specific text in my example below.

#navMainWrapper, #navSuppWrapper, #navCatTabsWrapper {
margin: 0em;
background-color: #abbbd3;
background-image: url(../images/tile_back.gif);
padding: 0.5em 0.2em;
font-weight: bold;
color: #ffffff;
height: 1%;
}

In my example below you can see that the reference to the image has been removed and I have changed the background color to blue.

#navMainWrapper, #navSuppWrapper, #navCatTabsWrapper {
margin: 0em;
background-color: #000CFF;
padding: 0.5em 0.2em;
font-weight: bold;
color: #ffffff;
height: 1%;
}

The image is referenced in four other tags throughout the CSS file. To completely change this look, you will need to remove or possibly change the reference. The tags that need to be changed are listed below. Simply look for the exact tags in the file and remove the image reference.

#navMainWrapper, #navSuppWrapper, #navCatTabsWrapper {
#navEZPagesTop {
.leftBoxHeading, .centerBoxHeading, .rightBoxHeading {
.productListing-rowheading {

It would probably be a good time to save your changes and take a look at the impact you have had on Zen Cart. Save your work and take a look at your cart in your browser. For those of you falling asleep at this point, you may need to hit refresh in your browser. Now, you may notice some throwbacks to the green theme at the bottom of each element in the browser. You can change this heavy green line by modifying the CSS file on the lines outlined below.

.leftBoxContainer, .rightBoxContainer {
margin: 0em;
border: 1px solid #9a9a9a;
border-bottom: 5px solid #336633;
margin-top: 1.5em;
}

If you want to make the width the same as the rest of the lines and change the color of the borders to match your header, you would set to it something like this:

.leftBoxContainer, .rightBoxContainer {
margin: 0em;
border: 1px solid #000CFF;
margin-top: 1.5em;
}

Now the store should look something like this:

Read Customizing Zen Cart Part 2 by clicking here.

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Would you like to perform the above (or more) on your site, but not comfortable with the code? WestHost can help, just fill out a request here.

To all Tomcat users out there, I’m sure many of you have had questions on how to get things up and running; questions like ‘Is Apache Tomcat the same thing as Tomcat?’, and ‘How do I get the :8080 to go away?’

What is Apache Tomcat?

Apache Tomcat and Tomcat are the same thing. Apache, in this case, is simply the parent project and does not refer to the Apache web server. Apache Tomcat acts as a servlet container that processes Java servlets/JSP pages. There are some specifications that can be made within the Apache web server to let Apache know whether or not to handle the request or pass it on to Tomcat for processing. These specifications are located in the mod_jk.conf (sometimes just jk.conf) file in the /etc/httpd/conf.d directory.

Great! So how do I get Apache Tomcat to find my JSP pages?

While a number of specifications can take place in the mod_jk.conf file, the most relevant is the JkMount directive. This is the option that tells Apache whether or not to pass the request on to Tomcat. If you create a new folder in the /var/tomcat5/webapps directory for your Java related content, which is where is should be, Apache will not know about it by default. If the folder is called ‘test’, for example, then you would be able to access the folder by going to http://yourdomain.com:8080/test/ but it would not work by going to just http://domain.com/test/ which is, of course, what most of you will want. To get this functionality, a JkMount directive would have to be used inside the jk.conf file. It would look as follows:

JkMount /test/* ajp13w

Once this change is made and Apache is restarted (notice, Tomcat does NOT need restarting in this case because it was an Apache directive in an Apache configuration file that was altered) then http://yourdomain.com/test/ will come up fine and will be handled by Tomcat, as desired. If you are familiar with SSH, you can use the ‘apachectl graceful’ command to restart Apache. Otherwise you can go in through your Site Manager under the Restart Account section and restart that way.

What if I want my Java web application to show up at http://yourdomain.com instead of http://yourdomain.com/folder/?

In this scenario, you will create a folder called ROOT (all upper case) inside the /var/tomcat5/webapps directory and put all of your java content in there. You will then setup the JkMount directive as follows and then restart Apache as mentioned above:

JkMount /* ajp13w

Now your Java web application is all up and running. That’s all it takes!

A few more tidbits for those who want to understand what all that means:

The ‘ajp13w’ entry above refers to a user specified in the /etc/httpd/conf/workers.properties file and stands for Apache JServ Protocol. To find out more on this protocol and its functions, see http://tomcat.apache.org/connectors-doc/ajp/ajpv13a.html. That should give you a good understanding of what role a Tomcat worker plays and how and why Tomcat processes are spawned and resources are used. A Tomcat worker is a Tomcat instance that is waiting to execute servlets or any other content on behalf of some web server. For example, we can have a web server such as Apache forwarding servlet requests to a Tomcat process (the worker) running behind it. In WestHost’s case, ajp13 and ajp12 are the only workers setup, ajp13 being the default worker, and the preferred worker due to it being configured to use sockets as it’s communication channel (see above link for further detail.) When the JkMount directive is used, it is assigned to the ajp13 worker as the entry specifies.

How to transfer a domain to WestHost:

1. EPP authorization code:
   Obtain the EPP code for your domain from your current registrar. Then either enter the code in the “note” section of the order form, or e-mail the EPP code to domainreg@westhost.com. You should also double check that your e-mail address under the WHOIS information is valid. Also, you will need to contact your current registrar within 24 hours of the transfer to remove the lock from your domain.
2. Fill out the transfer order form:
   • Step 1: Choose “Transfer Your Existing Domain” and select the duration length
   • Step 2: Choose a hosting plan, or skip if you already have a hosting plan with WestHost
   • Step 3: Fill out the rest of the form
3. Change DNS records:
   Once we have completed the transfer process you will receive an e-mail from us with your login information. This e-mail will contain important information regarding your DNS records. We recommend changing your DNS prior to the transfer, or right after it is completed; so that your domain is pointing to our servers.

NOTE:

In order to ensure a successful domain transfer from your current registrar, make sure your domain:

1. Has not expired, or will not be expiring within 14 days (If it’s past the due date, you’ll have to renew with the current registrar)
2. Has not been renewed within the last 45 days
3. Has not been registered within the last 60 days
4. Is not involved in any legal or payment disputes

Finally, after everything is submitted, the actual transfer could take 7-14 days to complete. Your site will not experience any downtime during this process. However, your site will experience downtime when changing the DNS records and the change could take up to 24 hours to propagate.

You can also visit our Domain Registration page in order to find out more details.

Glossary:

EPP Code: An Authorization Code (EPP Code) provides security for the domain name registration. Each domain name has its own code and is assigned by the registrar at the time the domain name is registered.

DNS: Domain Name Servers are used for translating domain names to IP addresses. They also include the domain name’s name server and mail server information.

This same philosophy of providing in-house support is shared by our parent company, UK2 Group. To read the recent press release about UK2’s in-house support, click here. Our experienced WestHost team is excited to assist with this consolidation by providing our in-house support to some of our partner brands. We are looking forward to the opportunity to work with new Web hosting clients from around the world!

• Server Reliability
• Top-notch Support Staff
• Competitive pricing

When it comes to server reliability don’t just take our word for it. We invite you to compare how WestHost has ranked among the worlds most reliable hosting providers by companies like Netcraft. Netcraft is widely considered one of the most reputable companies in the hosting industry in ranking out reliability amongst today’s top hosting providers. In November & December WestHost was at the top of the Netcraft list surpassing other hosting industry giants. How is this possible? It is simple; we make server uptime one of our top priorities and have a highly skilled support team backed by our state of the art data center. We stand behind our reputation by providing a solid SLA to our dedicated server clients.

WestHost is extremely proud of our internal support staff and their dedication in helping each client. We are not afraid to boast that we have one of the best teams in the Web hosting industry. Our team here is highly skilled and motivated in giving quick and convenient service. We are open 24 hours a day 7 days a week and can be reached by phone, live chat, or e-mail. We use careful selection in getting the right people to join our growing team of support personnel. One of the big reasons our support staff is so successful is that they love what they do!

Despite the above mentioned reliability and support team our pricing is extremely competitive. A WestHost dedicated server is smart economics when you consider what you get for what you are paying for. We are however, always looking for ways to become more competitive by offering promotions that offer double the ram or reduced set-up fees. We believe that when you compare our size, reputation, and strength that dollar for dollar WestHost is the King of the Web hosting!

If you need dedicated server hosting the choice is simple. Contact our Sales department today or order online.

One solution that many are turning to is Google Calendar, which is a fantastic solution. It offers many features, including the ability to subscribe to your calendars from desktop applications. If your software supports iCal, you can subscribe to your Google Calendar by clicking on the calendar under My Calendars, and choosing Settings. In the window that appears, make sure that the Calendar Details tab is selected. At the bottom, you will see several buttons, one of which displays “ical” – there is a button for both “public” and “private”, which will show only your public events or all events (both public and private). Copy and paste the URL from this button into your calendar application.

The disadvantage of iCal is that it is one-way – you can subscribe to updates from Google Calendar from your desktop calendar (Mozilla Sunbird, Mozilla Lightning, or Apple iCal, for some examples), but you cannot edit them remotely.

To solve this, Google has recently allowed CalDAV access. To use it, you will make use of an URL like https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/your@gmail.address/events – where your@gmail.address is your Gmail address. Using this link from WebCal-enabled applications like Mozilla Sunbird or Mozilla Lightning, you can both view and edit calendars shared via Google Calendar.

For many, this solution alone is excellent. A web-based viewer and editor (http://www.google.com/calendar) is available, as well as having the freedom to integrate it with local desktop calendars which may have other events that are not public.

One example of how you may wish to use this is to have your departmental calendar on Google Calendar, and then have personal events in your own local, non-shared calendar. This becomes very useful for coordinating a team while still having freedom to record your own calendar events.

The astute reader will have noticed a few possible downsides to the above solution. Firstly, each calendar must have a unique Gmail address associated with it, which could become a problem if you have a lot of calendars. Secondly, the calendar data is stored at Google. If you are concerned about security, backups, or just control, this can be an issue. Because I’m a particularly paranoid sort, I would like to keep my calendar data where I can see it and back it up as frequently as I would like.

To this end, we’ll turn to WebDAV on your WestHost account. We will set up basically the same thing as we accomplished with Google Calendar with respect to the ability to subscribe to a calendar in Mozilla Sunbird, Mozilla Lightning, or any other iCal or CalDAV compliant application. Remember that iCal is one-way, while CalDAV is multidirectional. You may also hear the terms WebCal and iCal through WebDAV – these are different names for the same thing, the read and write-capable calendar we’re calling CalDAV.

By rolling our own solution, we will gain direct access to the underlying calendar files for security or backup, and we’ll gain the ability to have as many calendars as we want without relying on the “one calendar per gmail address” approach. It also looks a bit more professional having the calendar at your own internet domain name; but the downside is that we’ll lose the very nice and convenient Google Calendar interface.

To begin, we will edit the file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. You may access this file using an FTP client, or by logging into your File Manager at http://www.yourdomain.com/fm/. Using the file manager, you can click the first slash above the file listing, and then click etc, and then httpd, then conf, and finally click the edit icon next to httpd.conf.

At the end of the file, you will add a section like:

<Directory /var/www/html/dav>
DAV on
</Directory>

You may change /var/www/html/dav to anything else you would like, so long as it’s not already in use by web content. For instance, you may prefer /var/www/html/calendars. Once you have selected the location that you would like, create the directory – using File Manager, you can browse to /var/www/html/ and use the Create Directory button to make the location where your calendar data will be stored.

Advanced users may also add basic password protection here. To do so, use something like this instead:

<Directory /var/www/html/dav>
DAV on

AuthType Basic
AuthName "WebDAV Storage"
require valid-user
AuthUserFile /etc/davpasswd
</Directory>

Save the contents of httpd.conf.

You must then create the password file /etc/davpasswd. This may be done in File Manager, or you may upload it via FTP. You will place one user-password combination per line – to generate the encrypted passwords, use this convenient tool: http://home.flash.net/cgi-bin/pw.pl

Just enter the username and password there, and copy and paste the line it generates into the file you will upload or save to /etc/davpasswd.

Next, you must restart the web server in your account. This may be done by logging into Site Manager at http://www.yourdomain.com/manager/ and using the “Restart” link, or advanced users may accomplish it via SSH with the command “/etc/init.d/httpd restart”. Note that if you have an error in the httpd.conf file, your web site will not be available – in this case, check over what you entered in the file to make sure it appears correct.

You have now accomplished everything you need to do in order to store calendars. The next step is to create some!

Your desktop calendar application can create a calendar by just providing the URL http://www.yourdomain.com/dav/mycalendar.ics, where www.yourdomain.com is your domain name and /dav/ is the location you chose to store your calendars, and of course mycalendar.ics is the name of the calendar you would like to create.

We’ll proceed with Mozilla Sunbird as an example. It is a free download located at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/ and works very well. Mozilla also produces a version integrated with Mozilla Thunderbird 2.x, called Lightning. In the upcoming Thunderbird 3 release, Lightning will be built in.

Start up Sunbird. From the File menu, choose New Calendar. Next, choose “On the Network”, and in the “Location” box type in the URL to your new calendar, e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com/dav/mycalendar.ics. Note that mycalendar.ics does not currently exist – Sunbird will create it on your server automatically when you add the calendar. Leave the Format option set at iCalendar (ICS) – because you are accessing a DAV-enabled location, Sunbird will automatically connect it in read/write mode.

Click Next, and you can choose a display name and color for events from this calendar. Finally, click Finish. If you had set up password protection, you will be asked for your username and password before the calendar can be saved.

You can now create as many calendars as you would like, knowing that they’re stored safely in your WestHost account where they are backed up and secure. Each calendar you create is stored on the server as an iCal format file, which you can download for backup purposes and use directly in most calendar applications if ever needed.