For those who want to preview Coppermine before actually installing it on a real production server we have created a Live-Demo:
The live-demo is not the actual Coppermine package that you should run on your webserver/webspace. It is just a package that provides a local webserver with a pre-configured Coppermine install rolled into one package to preview the "real" Coppermine Photo Gallery on your Windows box. The webserver is being started by only executing one single file, so you don't have to go through the troubles of setting up a webserver environment on your local PC just for evaluation purposes. The sole purpose of the live-demo is to give you an impression how the admin backend of Coppermine looks and feels. It is only meant to be used for evaluation purposes. You mustn't run it as a production system, because it has deliberately been configured in an unsecure manner to provide a newbie-proof experience in the first place.
The live-demo has been created using the tool
server2go, which is an app that allows you to create a portable webserver environment (using Apache, PHP, mySQL) for Windows. The software is donation-ware (everybody can use it for free, however you're asked to donate to the author). The Coppermine dev team would like to thank Timo Haberkern (the author of server2go) for providing this nice tool. It's mandatory though that you understand that the Coppermine group is not afiliated with server2go in any way - we do not provide support for it, and subsequently we don't support the live-demo.
The Live-Demo is experimental - not in terms of stability, but in terms of support. If it should turn out that the Live-Demo is causing too many support requests (although it goes totally unsupported, but I'm convinced that there
will be morons who will ask for support on it), we'll drop it. Make sure that it isn't you who is the culprit for the removal of the Live-Demo: don't ask questions about it. We mean it.
However, we'd appreciate feedback - tell us if the Live-Demo helped you in figuring out how Coppermine works.
Get the Live-Demo from the download section (link at the top of this page).
Joachim