Yesterday I downloaded the latest installer for Concrete5 and tried to install it. After creating the database and users, entering the information it all looked as though it was going to be a breeze – but the blue progress bar turned red and a back button appeared. There was no visible error message, but the red progress bar didn’t look good 🙁

After removing the tables from the database (all 167 tables had been created) I tried again and got the same result. After a bit of head scratching at the apparent lack of error messages (C5 is usually pretty good at letting you know what’s going wrong) I examined the source of the page. The error was there – but for some reason it wasn’t being displayed on the page.

Turns out C5 needs the PHP memory_limit raised to 32M to install. After adjusting this limit, restarting Apache the install completed.

The whole process is actually pretty nice and simple and being automatically logged in at the end is a nice touch.