Hello, I just learned about OSSN about a week ago and today I just finished installing and tweaking a fresh instance of v6.1 on my personal webserver and I wanted to share my thoughts and ask a few basic questions about the way OSSN currently behaves.

Environment:

• Host: DigitalOcean
• Centos7
• Apache 2.4.6
• Haproxy 1.5.18
• Firewalld 0.6.3
• PHP 7.4.26
• MariaDB 10.6.5
• OSSN 6.1
• OSSN Theme: Fake-book 6.2

Note - My entire LAMP stack is managed via Meza [1] which is an ansible project that configures and deploys a fully-featured (media)wiki-farm server and all supporting components including the OS. While meza is not designed for any other web applications, it was straight-forward to create a dedicated virtualhost for OSSN to run along side all the wikis.

Install challenges

• mod_rewrite Test - The mod_rewrite test in the installation check page was a problem. I knew mod_rewrite was enabled, but there is something wrong with the way OSSN gets the site_url at this stage. I think this was primarily due to apache running without SSL behind the proxy server handling the SSL termination. As a result, I think the OSSN installation was getting http://127.0.0.1:8082 as the site_url at this stage. I was easily able to defeat the check by editing installation/classes/OssnInstall.php and making sure that public static function is_mod_rewrite() always returns true .. that was fun.
• blocked:mixed-content - Once I was able to get past the pre-installation tests I was able to configure OSSN. Setting the database, Admin account, and other essentials was straight-forward, but once the site was configured and it was time to visit the welcome page, I found that the site was failing due to mixed (http and https) content being served. This was remedied by editing the value of $Ossn->urlin configurations/ossn.config.site.php to be https rather than just http due to the site_url issue (presumably).
• too many redirects - Once the mixed-media issue was cleared-up, the welcome page failed with the message too many redirects. This was tricky. I spent a few hours trying to fix this in .htaccess to no avail, but then discovered (in a discussion here) that there is a javascript function called ossn_redirect_absolute_url() in libraries/ossn.lib.javascripts.php that performs redirects for a variety of reasons.. to this function I hard-coded $baseurl to be my application url and edited all the of the $redirect = true; occurrences to $redirect = false;. And that solved the too many redirects problem.

After that, OSSN worked as intended.

Questions about standard behavior:

• Regarding Groups

  • Secret Groups? - I noted that the only two options for group privacy are: public, and closed. Is there a way (component) that allows for secret groups?
  • Invitations to a group - is there a way to invite friends/users to a group? or do they have to make the request?
  • Group Photo Albums - Is there a way (component or otherwise) to add albums in groups?

• Regarding Photos

  • Upload Progress indicator - I noticed that when uploading multiple photos that there is no progress indicator. Is this normal/expected?

Concluding remarks
I'd like to extend a very heartfelt thank you to the OSSN development community. Bravo. This is nearly perfect for what I have been hoping to do in 2022 to create a private social media site for my close friends and family. The ability to have a facebook-like application that is entirely free of advertisements and 100% controlled by the users (me and mine) is exactly what this world needs. I'm looking forward to contributing to the code as I can and as time permits.

Truest thanks,
/Rich

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meza
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Wnlt4b0nt0dpfzd7