A clean installation that fits shared hosting and says Exponential #

This page is for anyone installing Exponential 6.0.15, especially on shared hosting. July and August 2026 made the first run of a new installation smoother. Below is what you now get, in the order you meet it.

1. The setup wizard works with your own database only (16 July) #

Commit fdf0d52028. The wizard used to run SHOW DATABASES and open the mysql system database, which needs privileges a shared host does not give. You now need privileges only on your own database.

• For MySQL and MariaDB the database step has a Database name field. The name you type is used directly; the wizard does not look at other databases.
• A failed connection, a wrong password or a missing database is shown as an ordinary message on the page. It no longer ends in a blank error page.
• The details go to var/log/setup.log (for example eZStepSiteDetails: database requirement check failed (error code ...) for server ... user ... db ...), never the password.
• The progress reporter no longer fails in a web request because the constant STDOUT does not exist outside the command line.

If the wizard refuses your database, read the reason:

tail -n 20 var/log/setup.log

2. Packages bring what they need (29 July) #

Commit cb57cdd026. eZPackage::install() first installs every package named under requires in the package, then the package itself.

• A site package that is "import only" (it carries no files of its own) still pulls in its image or demo content package.
• A required package that cannot be found logs a warning; one that fails stops the install.
• A package that is already being installed is skipped, so circular requirements do not loop.

3. The default content says Exponential and speaks American English (15 August) #

Commits 4d9f7681b2, 3dc808f3ec, 71045a6cd8, e0f6916a36, ded9116491, 5f6edbd111, 3ebaf8dcd9 change the seed data in share/db_data.dba that the installer loads before a site package:

The seed touches the tables ezcontent_language, ezcontentclass, ezcontentclass_attribute, ezcontentobject_attribute and ezcontentobject_name. All the links in the description were checked to answer before they went in.

If you install with a site package, the package's own content comes after the seed and wins where they overlap.

4. Kickstart names (15 August) #

All access types of a kickstart install register the siteaccesses site and admin; see Kickstarter.

5. PHP 8 and other install blockers (15 August, 31 July) #

• Unserializing ezinteger, ezobjectrelation, ezobjectrelationlist and ezxmltext values tolerates missing XML nodes and null values (28d414f422).
• libxml errors during XML text parsing are suppressed; an embedded object_remote_id is resolved to an object id in XHTML output.
• The URL alias and class attribute caches ignore null and empty values.
• A content operation returns false only when a node is really missing.
• settings/transform.ini [search] has Commands[]=lowercase, which adds the lowercase transformation to the search group.
• eZPersistentObject returns an integer when it computes the next order number on PHP 8.4 (9cad41280a), which had broken installs.

6. Content package export is more forgiving (7 August) #

A node whose initial language is missing, or whose serialized attribute node is absent, is skipped by the content package export instead of ending the run (752adad843, 8af48c1e59). See ezpm.

Related pages #

• Install in one command: a site on SQLite without kickstart.ini, Kickstarter, Kickstarter CLI reference, setup wizard and the editor siteaccess
• What a new installation comes with: the default extensions, a useful robots.txt out of the box, installation name in page titles
• Installer logs and seed data, platform SQLite installer
• The product is called Exponential, About and Copyright pages, package licenses and Semantic Versioning
• History: July 2026, August 2026, September 2025, August 2025, July 2025, January 2025