I wanted to provide classified ads for the users of my website. One of my reasons for choosing a host using cPanel with Fantastico was the availability of Noah's Classifieds. However after studying the situation a bit I determined that the version which is installed by Fantastico is very out of date, and that a free install of the current version is available at the Noahs website. (http://www.noahsclassifieds.org/). I downloaded the installation .zip file then uploaded it to my public_html folder using the cPanel file manager. I extracted it successfully, again using the cPanel file manager; the extraction creates a new folder in your public_html folder which contains all the scripts and folders necessary to install and run Noah's Classifieds on your website. Then following the installation instruction found on the Noahs website, I ran the "install.php" file. It checks everything out and gives you feedback including what to put in the "config.php" file in the app folder. This is what it said my config file should look like:
<?php
$dbUser="username";
$dbUserPw="password";
$dbName="classifieds";
$hostName="localhost";
$dbPrefix="noah_";
$dbPort="";
$dbSocket="";
?>
Still using the cPanel file manager, I created the app\config.php file. Then using the cPanel MySQL function, I created a database user and database, attached them and gave the user all privileges. I was alert enough to notice that the user name had my TotalChoice account name appended to the front, so I did put "xyxyxyxy_username" into the $dbUser line. I then reran the install.php, but got a message that it could not create nor access the "classifieds" database. After trying numerous combinations, it finally dawned on me that the database had also been created with my account name appended. I edited the config.php file and changed the $dbName line to "xyxyxyxy_classifieds". After that, the installation went smoothly; I simply followed the onscreen direction using the cPanel file manager to delete the directed files and set the required permissions.
This current version of Noah's Classifieds is much better and easier to use than the ancient version installed by Fantastico. If you take advantage of my experiences, it should be almost as easy to install. And if you decide to get all the bells and whistles of the paid version, the upgrade will be much smoother.