**************
**************
DOCUMENTATION
**************
**************

Make sure you read the LICENSE file.  The GPL does not allow you to
incorporate any of this code into proprietary software, but it allows free
use otherwise. 

UPGRADES:

Please read the CHANGES file.

Also, read the UPGRADE file for information about the change in database
formats.

INSTALLATION:

To install, edit the config.in file and set the appropriate parameters
for database name, user, password, timezone and timezone correction factor. 
Make sure you have MySQL installed and working properly, and Apache configured 
with mod_php3 (3.05 or higher is best), otherwise this software will not work.

First, you need to create the appropriate tables in your MySQL database. 
These are the tables you will need:  (If you don't know how to do this,
please refer to the mysql documentation.) Create a database, called reminders:

   mysqladmin create reminders

If you want to use another name, make sure you specify it in the
config.php3 file!

After that, set up a user in MySQL with a login and password which is defined in
config.php3, so that you can access this database from this script:

   mysql
   GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP
   ON reminders.*
   TO root@localhost
   IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
   exit

Inside that database, create the tables from the dump file
"reminders.mysql" which was included as part of this program:

   mysql reminders < reminders.mysql

Ok, the hard part is done.  

The normal way to install E*Reminders is to simply place the entire 
archive folder into the root HTML document directory of your web server
and make links to point people there!

Another way to install this is to create a new user, and copy all of the
files that come with this program into the public_html directory of that
new user. Make sure config.in isn't readable by users on the system, 
because it has password for the MySQL database coded inside
it.  (If it is readable from the web, it's okay, because nothing will 
be reveled if it is run from the web.  

The mail.php3 file should be set to run every 15 minutes or so via a cron
job.  To do this, you can use cron entries that briefly execute a web browser
that accesses mail.php3 and triggers waiting reminder events to be mailed.
Here are some sample cron entries for using wget (lynx may also be used):

   00 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -q -O /dev/null -nd http://localhost/reminder/mail.php3
   15 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -q -O /dev/null -nd http://localhost/reminder/mail.php3
   30 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -q -O /dev/null -nd http://localhost/reminder/mail.php3
   45 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -q -O /dev/null -nd http://localhost/reminder/mail.php3

You can then use the cron log as a E*Reminders log, since
mail.php3 outputs information about what is getting sent out where.

If this documentation doesn't make sense, please feel free to suggest
changes to ben@amvalue.com.  Also send bug reports, suggestions, and patches
to the same address.
