Our CVS (concurrent versioning system) is now public! You may go to cvs.voter2voter.org and download the latest snapshot of AdvoKit (click on "CVS Snapshots (updated daily)" at the lower right).

Here are the installation instructions:

If you are reading this, then you must have extracted the 
Advokit 1.0 distribution.

ADVOKIT INSTALLATION REQUIREMENTS:

* Apache/IIS

Advokit has been tested on the Apache and IIS webservers, but will
probably run on any server that supports PHP.

* PHP

Your webserver must be running PHP 4.1.x or above.  Advokit was first
developed under 4.1.2, and later with 4.2.3, both with excellent results.

You DO NOT need to have register_globals on for Advokit to work.

* MySQL

MySQL must be installed.  Advokit was developed with version 3.23.41,
so you should probably have that version or above.  No unusual or
arcane MySQL features are used, so earlier versions might work.  The
installer will try to create transaction-safe tables if your MySQL
installation supports such tables.  See the documentation regarding
custom fields for more information.

* Smarty

The Smarty template engine must be installed.  Preferably 2.6.2 or
above.  Advokit was mostly developed with version 2.0, but 2.3 and
2.6.2 have been used extensively. 2.6.2 is bundled with this release,
and you can tell the installer to install it for you automatically.

HOW TO INSTALL ADVOKIT

(1) Extract distribution.

Extract the distribution tarball somewhere under your webroot.  This
will create the directory advokit-installer-1-0-0 in the directory
where you extracted the file.

(2) Set permissions.
Make sure the new directory is FULLY readable and writeable by your
webserver process:

- For unix/linux, just do a chmod -R 777 on advokit-installer-1-0-0.
  If you know the user and group for the webserver process, you
  are better off doing a chown -R user.group advokit-installer-1-0-0.
  
- For windows, make sure "Everyone" has "Full Control" over
  advokit-installer-1-0-0, and that these permissions are propagated
  to subdirectories.

Don't worry about security for this directory, since you can just blow
it away after the installation.  If all goes well, the directory
advokit-installer-1-0-0 will exist for no longer than 10 minutes.

(3) Browse to the installation page.
If your webserver is set up properly, then just browse to the
directory advokit-installer-1-0-0 that you just created.  Otherwise,
browse directly to advokit-installer-1-0-0/install/index.html.

(4) Follow the directions.
There aren't many.  There are about 15 pieces of information you must
specify, such as database host, user, password, installation
directories, and so on.  You will be prompted each time such
information is required.

(5) Delete the installation directory

After the installation completes, you can login as user "admin",
password "admin". Change the admin password as soon as you login.

NOTE: If the installation fails because certain directories don't
exist and the webserver can't create them, don't give up.  Each time
this happens, installer will tell you exactly what directory to
create.  Just create the directory and set permissions so that the
webserver can write to it.  Then click the "Go Back" button and try
again.  Eventually you will be able to continue.  This is typically
only a problem with either Windows servers, or with Unix servers in a
shared hosting environment.

If you have problems installing, or you have general comments
or questions, send a message to pat@voter2voter.org Be sure to check
http://cvs.voter2voter.org for updates.