Creating CMS Instances

Instances of CMS Fiona make it possible to maintain different sets of content plus configuration data while still using common application resources. Common resources are, for example, the executable CMS applications, third party software, and the localization files. When updating common resources, they need to be replaced only once instead of several times as would be the case with several complete installations. This significantly reduces the administration effort.

The content and its structure, the meta data, the configuration and the scripts, on the other hand, are a part of each instance.

Each instance of a CMS application is represented by its own instance directory below the instance directory. After the installation exactly one instance exists. It can be found in the default directory.

Proceed as follows to create a new CMS instance. Basically, the new instance will be set up like the default instance after the installation of the CMS.

• For every instance an individual license file with at least 10 CU (Concurrent Users) is required. Please contact JustRelate to have your licence divided (in accordance with your contract) into the number of licence files required or to acquire additional licences.

• Execute the script /share/createInstance/createInstance (Unix) or \share\createInstance\createInstance.bat (Windows). (The path is relative to the Fiona installation directory.)

• The script asks you to enter the path of the licence file:
  Enter the path to the new instance's license file:
  Input here the path of the license file belonging to the new instance.

• Afterwards the name of the new instance is queried:
  Enter the instance name:
  from version 6.5: Use only lower-case letters from a to z (no umlauts or other special characters), digits and underscores. The name may be up to 9 characters long and needs to start with a letter. The reason for this is that the instance name becomes part of database table names generated by the CMS. Several database-related restrictions apply to the length of names and the characters they may be composed of.

• The script then asks for the first port of the port range:
  Enter the port range start (e.g. 3101):
  Enter here the smallest port number to be used by the CMS. The script will create further (greater) port numbers, starting from the specified number.

• Then a directory named like the new instance is created below Fiona/instance. In this directory .../share/newinstance.zip is unpacked. The licence is copied into the config directory created by the unpacking procedure.

  

• Then the configuration files of the new instance are adapted. This includes, among other things, the ports and the names of the web applications. The output of the script informs you of the parameters and the respective files in which they have been set.

• Under Windows the services are then installed.

• The result is an individual CMS instance consisting of the CM, SES, and the GUI and PM-PL web applications. PM-PL provides the portlets for preview pages opened from the GUI. For deploying the web applications use the rc.npsd deploy (Unix) or rc.npsd.bat deploy (Windows) command to be found in the bin directory of the new instance.

• If required, prepare the instance for productive use by integrating a different database, activating the incremental export and configuring a different user manager.

The new instance is now ready to be used and the CMS applications can be started using instance/instanceName/bin/rc.npsd start. At startup, the applications automatically create their database tables in the configured databases. Likewise, the Search Engine Server automatically creates its preset collections. The HTML user interface (GUI) can be accessed via the URL path instance_name/NPS, where instance_name is the name of the new instance. You can log into the new instance as the root user using the empty password.