I'm slowly going to be running a series of posts on running Concrete5 through multiple environments.  There are many challenges to running a CMS in shops with strict development practices.

One of the challenges that immediately comes to mind is the ultimate need to create a release flow that affords you a stable production instance.

Smaller organizations tend to be limited on resources or talent and find themselves developing on the production server.

Most medium to large organizations soon desire to have more transparency in the development environment.  They want to weigh in on technology and implementation decisions and ensure that stable products are released.

One of the first things you can do to improve your development environment is to create a multi-staged environment.  Creating a good mutli-staged environment affords you a place to develop, a place to iterate and finally a place to serve production code.  This generally involves providing an interface for changing settings between environments.

I had previously posted a guide on how to get pretty URL's working in conjunction with DreamHost's shared hosting and Concrete5 CMS.  Recently we were attempting to get fastcgi running at Monsoon and were confronted with the dreaded "No input file specified" that I was used to seeing on Dreamhost.  I tried applying the same solution but to no avail.

After much poking about, I've finally arrived at a solution that seems to work on both Dreamhost and over here at Monsoon.

First, set everything up as you normal would.  Get your Concrete5 installation running and turn on pretty url's only to find they don't quite work.

Now the changes...

In your root site directory, create a file named pretty_url.php and fill it with the following contents:

require('index.php');

Next, edit the .htaccess file you originally created and change one line.

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

becomes

RewriteRule ^.*$ pretty_url.php/$1 [L]

That's all there is to it!  Save your changes and enjoy your pretty URL's.  It seems that the regular expression used in the RewriteRule causes php-cgi to fail.  If we just modify that regular expression to stop capturing, it works well.  I'm not sure why pretty_url.php was needed, but the solution doesn't 100% function without it.  I settled on the pretty_url.php method after reading this post.

Enjoy!

** UPDATE: My aunt, who works for a very reputable potato company, suggested placing the potatos in the fridge overnight before beginning this process.  She says it increases the natural sugars in the potato which allows them to brown better.  Thanks Heather! **

I made shredded hashbrowns from scratch for the second time in my life... However, it was the first time I actually did a little research first.  Mui delicioso!

Here's what I did...