Installation and Set-up

More experienced users are asked to patient if this page offers more detail than some of them will need.

Installation

The complete library of Yeti files is available at http://yeti.yowsie.com/yeti.zip

Every effort has been made to ensure the safety and security of this file but please double-check with your own A/V before deploying.

The filenames in the ZIP file include the path to the Yeti subdrectory (e.g. "yeti/file.ext") so you should extract to the root directory of your website, either directly on your server or to your desktop for uploading by FTP. That should create a subdirectory "yeti" containing the files. Note that the file "ip-to-country.csv" is quite large (4Mb) and is used to detect where your site visitors seem to come from.

Please read and respect the GNU License which is included in the package.

The package has been designed to work "out of the box". You should not need to make any changes before you run it except, maybe, to change the default language from "en" (English) in "yeti.ini". These instructions cover options and alternatives.

Set up

Yeti was developed and tested on a Linux Server with Apache 2 and php 5. In that environment, all the full urls and filepaths can be detected automatically so there is no need to declare them.

You should, therefore, be able to go straight to "http://www.yourdomain.com/yeti" and see the the page that creates a User Record. Please read the instructions carefully and then specify the first (manager) user by entering your own username and password. After you save them, future calls to "http://www.yourdomain.com/yeti" will take you instead to the Yeti management page and you may enter additional users (mostly translators) from there. See "Usernames and Passwords" below for a note about alternative authorisation.

Just to get Yeti working, you should not need to change anything in the file "yeti.ini". However, after the scripts have detected relevant variables automatically, "yeti.ini" is called so that they can be overwriten to customise the installation as discussed here.

Installation Variables

The first section of "yeti.ini" sets the window titles etc. that your editors see. These will NOT affect your normal pages viewed by the public. The author understands that some developers will want to re-brand the Yeti pages - you need only make sure that the copyright and any <!--hidden--> notices remain.

This section also notes the default language for your website. If changing from English ("en"), you must use the ISO639 two-letter codes in lower case. Find these by going to "» Manage Language List" from "http://www.yourdomain.com/yeti"

Country-specific and Language-specific Pages

By default, Yeti runs a check on each visitor's likely location from the remote IP address and offers pages in the appropriate available translation. If you opt to omit this, your website will open in the langauge you used when making your original pages. You can also completely comment out any reference to country selection if you don't need country-specific pages or inclusions.

In many installations, all you need is a simple translation of the text on the pages. However, Yeti provides for you to make pages with special material for particular countries. See the howto page for instructions. You could, for instance, make country-specific home pages including overlays announcing special events or promotions.

In the application as supplied, visitors change country or language from a box displayed on all pages. After changing language they are returned to the page from which they made the selection. This is helpful to people whose native language is not available on your website, allowing them to toggle between other languages to get a sense of your text. For that reason, a good way to put this function into your own menu is to keep a version of that box, but set its visibility to "hidden" and have it revealed from your menu.

Because a visitor might be on a country-specific page when selecting a new country, they are then normally taken instead to your home page. You can specify an alternative. In the rare event that you use language-specific pages you can set a special page to follow a language change too.

If you don't use the in-built selection box at all, comment out the reference to "yeti_select" to stop a call to "yeti_select.php" which makes the overlay.

Usernames and Passwords

The installation includes a logging-on facility which sets a session variable to the approved username. A function "ParseUser" in "yeti.php" recovers the user's permissions. To integrate these operations into another log-on system, check out that function and the comments in the file "yeti_login.php".

The "document root" of your website is set by your web server (Apache etc.) and the public cannot read files from the directories above it. So the next directory up is a good place to store the file with your usernames and (encrypted) passwords. If you need it, "yeti.ini" offers the option to specify an alternative location.

Lists of Pages

To enhance security, Yeti hides some detail from the people you get to translate your pages. They don't get to see the source code of your .php files, just the text to be translated. You need to see which .htm (.html) files need to be prepared for translation and those sorts of files are in the public domain anyway, so there's no point hiding those. Apart from that, no Yeti user should need to know any files even exist. If you need to change the list of file types they can know about, there is an option in "yeti.ini" for you to do that.

Structure

In the very unlikely event that your system has some problem detecting where the Yeti files are and how they relate to your "document root", these can be declared at the end of "yeti.ini"