En:Does phpCMS work with Apaches user-directories?

From phpCMS

Question:

Does phpCMS work with Apaches user-directories (Apache module mod_userdir)?

Answer:

Currently phpCMS is not capable to handle the Apache webservers userdirectories (mod_userdir).

Normally the path in the URL entered into the webbrowser is the same as the path in the filesystem.

So if you open for example the page

http://www.example.com/foo/bar/somepage.html

the webbrowser will read the file

<document_root>/foo/bar/somepage.html

from your disc. The path and filename behind the domainname in the URL is always equal to the real directory path relative to the document-root of the webserver.

Apache user-directories are an exception of that rule: The apache webserver has a special feature where it can handle so called "user-directories". Apache recognizes them by the tilde character "~" in the URL. The string behind that tilde character is the username.

If you open for example

http://www.example.com/~someone/somepage.html

Apache recognizes the "~" character and it knows that it doesn't has to search for the file "somepage.html" in the directory

<document_root>/~someone/somepage.html

but instead in a public-html subdirectory of the home-directory of user "someone", which could be for example in

/usr/home/someone/public_html/somepage.html

phpCMS currently has problems with that, as it takes the path from the URL and it doesn't know anything about user-directories. So phpCMS thinks it can find the page "somepage.html" at <document_root>/~someone/somepage.html which is the wrong location.

We currently don't have any workaround for that problem available, so in our opinion phpCMS can not be used together with user-directories in Apache.

Fortunately user-directories are quite uncommon and mostly only used on servers of universities and schools which offer their users to publish own websites.