Chapter 1. Introduction to WACS Installation

Table of Contents

WACS Overview
About This Book
Goals
About The Examples

WACS Overview

Welcome to WACS, Web-based Adult Content Server, a free software package for the management of material of an "Adult Nature" (or basically whatever euphermism for porn you prefer). It is web-based and can be used for the management of an existing collection, as a download manager, or as a back-end system for running a commercial adult web site. It is dramatically different from most other image gallery systems in that it understands photo sets and video clips as basic concepts, instead of single photographs. It also includes far more specialised tagging, source, relationship and attribute marking concepts than other more generalised systems.

WACS is extremely configurable, making extensive use of configuration files written in eXtensible Markup Language (XML). This book is one of a collection of manuals we have created to help you through the various aspects of using a system as complex as WACS. This guide is solely targeted to installation - additional guides exist for Users, Configuration, Administration and Programming.

About This Book

This book is an installation guide for WACS site managers or system administrators seeking to install the WACS environment on their systems. It does assume a certain amount of familiarity with the normal processes of installing software packages on your systems; the sections on manual installation in particular also assume a basic knowledge of using the Unix operating system (or any other future supported OS platform). It also provides an overview to installing the WACS environment on a web hosting site using an environment like cPanel.

To get the best from this book, you should ideally be familiar with the basic user interface of the WACS applications themselves - the WACS User Guide would be an ideal primer for this and should introduce you to many of the concepts and tools being used here. There is also no substitute for using a real WACS site to get a general feel for how things work and are laid out. Our demonstration site is available at PinkMetallic.com and provides an opportunity to try WACS hands-on.

Goals

The task of installing WACS onto a new server system consists of a number of distinct steps; these are:

  • Preparing the host system
  • Installing the pre-requisite software
  • Installing the WACS applications and modules
  • Getting a working configuration
  • Installing some initial data

Some of these topics will be mentioned briefly here and will be covered in more depth in other guides in the WACS documentation set.

About The Examples

For copyright/licensing reasons, the example images feature sets from photoshoots by the main developer of WACS (Beaky) and a friend of his. These sets are available at our demonstration site, PinkMetallic.com where you can experience WACS in action. Currently access to PinkMetallic.com is free, but we may at some point in the future make a small charge for access if it doesn't receive the revenue we hope for from referrals.