- Compatability
- Configuration
- Date handling
- Themes & icons
Compatability
With what browsers does Bumblebee work?
Bumblebee is known to work OK with a wide variety of browsers.
We know that Bumblebee works with all Gecko-derived browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape),
KHTML-derived browsers (Safari, Konqueror)
and with Internet Explorer 6. It is partially functional for Internet Explorer 5 for Windows and
not functional with Internet Explorer 5 for Mac.
With what browsers does Bumblebee work well?
The more recent and standards-compliant the browser, the better it
will work. Firefox, Konqueror and Safari all perform very well, while lack of standards
compliance and the age of Internet Explorer 6 shows (the calendar view tends to look a little ugly).
Will Bumblebee work on Linux, BSD, MacOS X or Windows Server?
Bumblebee was developed under Debian GNU/Linux Sarge and Etch and works
with the LAMP setup in that distribution. Other Linux distributions that it has also been
tested on and found to work well include Debian Etch and CentOS 4.
It is also reported to work under MacOS X 10.4.6 (and that means it probably works
fine under all MacOS X and BSD systems).
Basically, any un*x-like operating system that
runs Apache, MySQL and PHP should run Bumblebee just fine (but you knew that before you
installed a un*x-like operating system!).
Windows Advanced Server 2003 with Apache is also known to work and from version 1.0.1,
Windows with IIS also works but has not been extensively tested.
Does Bumblebee work with MySQL5, Apache2 etc?
You shouldn't have any problems moving to other software versions, but since
both MySQL and PHP tend to 'fix' things between minor revisions in a way that can break
code, you'll have to be a little wary.
Bumblebee is
known to run very nicely with:
PHP 4.3.
x (
x > 9) and PHP 4.4.
x;
Apache 1.3.
x (
x > 29);
MySQL 4.0.
x (
x > 20) and 5.0.
x (
x > 20).
(Bumblebee 1.0.3 or newer is required to run the installer script with MySQL 5 as MySQL changed the way
it handles boolean values; the rest of Bumblebee will
work fine with MySQL 5 (
bug report).
Older or newer versions of the other utilities
may also work fine; they are just untested (please see
separate question about PHP5).
If you can offer any other information from your installation experiences,
please
contact the developers.
Does Bumblebee work with MySQL5, PHP5, Apache2 etc?
The 1.0 series of Bumblebee does
not
work with PHP5 as the meaning of the assignment operator was changed for objects.
However, the
developer snapshots do run fine under PHP5 and
are available for testing.
If you test out the developer snapshots, then please
contact the developers
and pass on your feedback (whether it all works fine or not... does no bug reports mean bug-free
code or just that no-one has tested it?).
Configuration
Does Bumblebee support other languages?
The current stable version of Bumblebee is only in English.
However, the
developer snapshots have been internationalised
and contain German translations. There is some interest in a Chinese and maybe French translations
too, so hopefully they will be available soon.
If you'd like to help with translating Bumblebee (and it's not that hard to do so, it's just editing
a text file to include translations), please
contact the Bumblebee developers.
I can't log in. Why not?
There can be many reasons for this, but the most common are usernames not
matching sanity checks (which prior to 1.0.3 required usernames to be lowercase by default)
and forgotten or mistyped passwords. To find out why Bumblebee
won't let you log in or to reset the admin password if it has been lost,
have a look at the
unlocking your installation page.
Help! I've locked myself out and can't remember the admin password!
From version 1.0.3, it is easy to unlock an installation of Bumblebee
and reset the admin password (
full instructions).
I can log in but when I click on a link I get sent back to the login page again. What's wrong?
The login credentials a stored in a session cookie; if you do not accept
the cookie or the parameter
BasePath in your
bumblebee.ini file is incorrect then you will see this
behaviour.
(
configuring)
Internals/Y2k etc
Is Bumblebee Y2k compliant?
Since Bumblebee was written in 2004-2006, it had better be! All dates are stored using
4-digit years and MySQL native date types.
How does Bumblebee store dates?
In representing dates for MySQL or display, Bumblebee all dates in ISO date format (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS). The date and time are always the local wall clock time: your users work against the wall clock and so does Bumblebee. For internal calculations, seconds since epoch is used.
What happens with daylight saving? Help! They've just changed the daylight saving algorithm on me, will that break Bumblebee?
Because Bumblebee always uses the local wall clock time, daylight saving is irrelevant. While this saves your bacon from worrying about daylight saving algorithms and changes to when daylight saving starts or stops, twice a year, the number of hours used by a user on an overnight booking will be wrong by +/-1 hour.
Themes & icons
Can I change your horrible pastel colours and use my institution's template?
Of course. Bumblebee was designed to handle the vaguaries of institutional web page templates
as best as is possible. The template and stylesheets are all in the theme/ directory. The Bumblebee menu
can be placed either before or after the content, alter the colours of Bumblebee's output by editing
the bumblebee-custom-colours.css. Any PHP you want can be included within the templates; some variables
are set before calling the templates so that parts of the template like the <title> tag can be set appropriately.
Is the icon for "free time" really a pig with a twirly tail?
Umm... it's supposed to be a cute little old-fashioned alarm clock. Try stronger glasses or
a large font size for your screen!
