FAQ | Psych Desktop

I'm using php4. Can I use Psych Desktop on my server?

No. Psych Desktop only works on php5. This is because php5 has many new features we need to keep things easy to maintain. Unfortunately, we are unable to emulate those features in php4.

During the installation process, the progress bar stops with no error message or there is an error message that I do not understand

If there is no error message shown, it's most likely that you entered your server's information incorrectly. Try going back and verifying the information is correct.

If you see a bunch of things in brackets followed by a number, you can figure out what the error is:
If the number is 6, that means that there was a problem selecting the database, or creating the tables. Verify that the tables do not already exist, and the database user has the permissions they need.
If the number is 4, this means there was a problem connecting to the database server. Make sure that the configuration settings are correct.

I'm using a windows server, and when I click on files to open them nothing happens

You need to either get mimetypes working correctly in PHP. Make sure you have the mod_magic module enabled and you have set the path to your magic.mime file in php.ini:

mime_magic.magicfile = "$PHP_INSTALL_DIR\magic.mime"

Remember to substitute the $PHP_INSTALL_DIR for your actual path to PHP in the above example. e.g. c:\php

When all else fails, you can try installing the Fileinfo pecl module, because Psych Desktop will use that module when getting the mimetype using the method included with PHP fails.

If everything above did not work, please throw us a ticket in our bug tracker.

What are the design philosophies of the project?

Well, we want 90% of the server-side code to be for storage, while the other 10% is used for authentication. We try to use as little server-side code as possible, which allows us to have backends written in both PHP and Python. According to ohloh, less then 5% of our code is written in PHP. We don't know how much the Python backends will take up since they are not done.