The Dimensions Matching Systems (DMS) has been running almost by itself for almost four years. It has several thousand registered users, and it's probably still the dating system software most customized for our community's interests and needs. However, I never publicize it, and so it's low profile and almost a secret. That's really too bad as DMS had significant potential and some fun features, like personal forums and such.
Anyway, I feel it's time to install something a bit flashier and more modern, and I found a good candidate which I felt I could customize for Dimensions, and this is where it gets technical. I tried to install the thing yesterday, but it wanted a particular graphics library. I have it, but it's rev. 1.6 instead of 2.0. So I downloaded 2.0, but that would only install if I had Autoconf on the system. So I downloaded and installed that, and then installed GD rev. 2.0. Sadly, the dating system installer still didn't see it and insisted I only had rev. 1.6. Possibly because it wants a version of GD that is compiled into PHP. So I commented out the GD test in the installer script. Unfortunately, the installer then errored out because it expected a function that is only available in a version of PHP that's newer than what I have on this Red Hat 9 box (4.2.2). So I looked into upgrading PHP to the latest rev available since that would also have GD compiled in but, at the last moment, found that it wants a newer version of Apache 2.x than what I am running, and upgrading Apache isn't always smooth, so I decided against it. Grr.
That's an example of what's going behind the scenes before you see some fancy new system on Dimensions....
Anyway, I feel it's time to install something a bit flashier and more modern, and I found a good candidate which I felt I could customize for Dimensions, and this is where it gets technical. I tried to install the thing yesterday, but it wanted a particular graphics library. I have it, but it's rev. 1.6 instead of 2.0. So I downloaded 2.0, but that would only install if I had Autoconf on the system. So I downloaded and installed that, and then installed GD rev. 2.0. Sadly, the dating system installer still didn't see it and insisted I only had rev. 1.6. Possibly because it wants a version of GD that is compiled into PHP. So I commented out the GD test in the installer script. Unfortunately, the installer then errored out because it expected a function that is only available in a version of PHP that's newer than what I have on this Red Hat 9 box (4.2.2). So I looked into upgrading PHP to the latest rev available since that would also have GD compiled in but, at the last moment, found that it wants a newer version of Apache 2.x than what I am running, and upgrading Apache isn't always smooth, so I decided against it. Grr.
That's an example of what's going behind the scenes before you see some fancy new system on Dimensions....
