x2engine on shared hosting without PDO

I have a friend who was interested in playing with a web based CRM (Contact Relational Management) on their own shared hosting webserver. I looked around and eventually arrived at x2engine. The x2engine is built on top of the YiiFramework and only requires MySQL 5 and PHP 5.1 or greater. Since he had PHP 5.2 I thought we would be all set.

I uploaded the x2engine.zip file via my friends cpanel page and installed it into his /public_html folder. Created MySQL databse via phpMyAdmin. vistited the /x2engine folder with my webbrowser and put in my database information and then got this error

include(PDO.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory

The good news is it takes less than 5 minutes to fix this error. I found the solution in less than 30 minutes of Googling. However it took me almost 6 additional hours to figure out what to do. So in hopes of saving someone else this kind of grief let me explain How to install x2engine or any other YiiFramework on a shared hosting service that has disabled PDO.,

It turns out PHP 5.1 introduces something called PDO (PHP Datatbase Objects). Many hosting servies that provide shared hosting disable PDO where it is not possible to enable it. As it turns out there is a workaround for this called PHPPDO, which is a php library that provides a PHPPDO emulation layer. My problem was that I tried to install the PHPPDO library right from their SourceForge page. It turns out there is a YiiFramework extension that will plug right in to any YiiFramework based app such as x2engine.

In the case of the x2engine you have to visit the webpage and set up the database information for it to create the config/dbConfig.php. The YiiFramework says the file will be config/main.php but the x2enigne uses config/dbConfig.php.

The YiiFramework page for PHPPDO is found at http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/phppdo/ On the right hand side of the page under the search bar it says Downloads and there you will find a link to phppdoextension_1.4.tar.bz2 which links to http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/phppdo/files/phppdoextension_1.4.tar.bz2

Once you have that file in hand here is what you need to do. All of this can be done from cPanel. I will act like your website is at http://example.com

1. Create your mysql database and user/password for accessing the database with phpMyAdmin.
   
2. Upload the x2enginge.zip file to your /public_html folder then extract the x2engine.zip and you will end up with /public_html/x2engine.
3. Vistit http://example.com/x2engine and fill out you admin user password, admin user email address and the information from step 1 for your MySQL server. When done click on the button at the bottom of the page to create the config files. This includes /public_html/x2engine/protected/config/dbConfig.php.
4. Upload phppdoextension_1.4.tar.bz2 to the /public_html/x2engine/protected/extensions folder. Extract the phppdoexentsion_1.4.tar.bz2 file.
5. Edit the file /public_html/x2engine/protected/config/dbConfig.php and insert after the $db=array( the following two line 'class'=>'application.extensions.PHPPDO.CPdoDbConnection', 'pdoClass' => 'PHPPDO', and save the file
6. Visit the page http://example.com/x2engine which will now work.

The dbConfig.php file will look pretty much like this, mind you, the connection information will be specific to your site:

<?php
$db=array( 
 'class'=--> 'application.extensions.PHPPDO.CPdoDbConnection',
 'pdoClass' => 'PHPPDO',
 'connectionString' => 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=database',
 'emulatePrepare' => true,
 'username' => 'username',
  'password' => 'password',
 'charset' => 'utf8',
);
$appName='X2Engine';
$gii=array('class'=>'system.gii.GiiModule',
 'password'=>'badtad00',
 // If removed, Gii defaults to localhost only. Edit carefully to taste.
 'ipFilters'=>false,
);
$email='user@example.com';
$language='en';