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There are three installation options

a la carte

The a la carte option means that you can download any component of Ode separately. The script itself is always available to download as are all of the addins, bundled themes, and anything else that is considered part of project.

bundles

There will always be at least a single standard bundle available for download. Should it seem beneficial to the community, there may be more than one. The bundle will include Ode itself, a small selection of addins which are considered especially useful or popular, a default configuration file, and anything else necessary for a working Ode installation, including installation instructions.

XAMMP based installer

I'll let the the people responsible for XAMPP describe their project

Many people know from their own experience that it's not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.

So essentially XAMPP allows anyone to download a single package that contains everything needed to run Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl from (and this is key) it's own self-contained directory.

An XAMPP installation is not only easy to install but it's also trivially easy to uninstall. Just delete the XAMMP directory.

Furthermore, XAMPP includes a nice uncomplicated graphical interface for starting and stopping services, which is both convenient and important from a security perspective. Disabling unneeded network services is one of the most significant steps you can take toward securing a network-attached PC, whether client or server. Being able to visually confirm which services are enabled then is not a trivial thing.

What does XAMPP have to do with Ode? To simplify the installation of Ode as much as possible, there is an Ode installer based on the XAMPP distribution. This has been done in the most obvious way. The various XAMPP distributions were downloaded, Ode files put into place and the distributions were archived again and made available here.

All you need to do is download the XAMPP based installer, extract the files, move them to some convenient directory (for example Applications/ for Mac OS X, Program Files/ on Windows, or opt/ for Linux), start the web server using XAMPP's GUI, and not only do you have a working Apache server but a working Ode install as well!

The one problem with this setup is the XAMPP installer weighs in at as much as 100MB. That seems like an awful lot of overhead for puny little Ode (< 1 MB including all of the themes mentioned above, a selection of addins and documentation).

What to do about that?

Firstly, I would encourage you to download the full XAMPP/Ode installer if at all possible.

The extra packages (MySQL, PHP, etc.) are unnecessary for Ode but may prove useful to you for other projects. For example, maybe you'll decide that Ode isn't the platform for you. In that case you shouldn't have any trouble installing something like WordPress now that you have a working MySQL database and Apache server with PHP ready to go.

Also I'd prefer not to be in the position of encouraging you to cannibalize the XAMMP package.

Keep in mind that all of the extra software will not complicate your system, will not have any performance impact, and does not present any security risk. Important: remember to keep all unneeded services disabled!

What this will cost you is a max of approx 100MB of hard drive space.

Secondly, I will make available a gutted version of XAMPP/Ode that includes only what's necessary for Ode (Apache and Perl). This will be considerably smaller but otherwise identical to the full XAMMP/Ode package. There won't be any modification of the files included, but there will be far fewer of them.

Next (Simple upgrades)