Horde is an application framework used by a web-based email client IMP I use to read my email. From the Horde site [www.horde.org]:

The Horde Project is about creating high quality Open Source applications, based on PHP and the Horde Framework. The guiding principles of the Horde Project are to create solid standards-based applications using intelligent object oriented design that, wherever possible, are designed to run on a wide range of platforms and backends. There is great emphasis on making Horde as friendly to non-English speakers as possible. The Horde Framework currently supports many localization features such as Unicode and right-to-left text and generous users have contributed many translations for the framework and applications.

Today I downloaded and attempted to install Horde 3.0.8 - released on Sunday 11th December 2005 - something appears to be wrong as I didn't get very far. I followed all the given instructions, my server is configured correctly, all the dependencies are installed and working. I got so far as to use the web-based setup / configuration screen but it didn't allow me to save any settings or complete the setup process. Following the instructions to the letter; I went to the 'Authentication' tab, selected 'IMAP Authentication', the page reloaded but didn't reflect my choice from the 'authentication backend' drop-down list. Instead it wouldn't display anything other than 'Let a Horde application handle authentication' but without the additional drop-down to select the application to use. I initially suspected some Javascript incompatibility as I normally use Firefox and sooo many applications are written against Internet Explorer. But after several attempts from different browsers & platforms I gave up on the authentication tab, opting to try at least the 'Database' tab and configure MySQL. I could easily fill out all the details but when I tried to 'Generate Horde Configuration' it threw me back to the 'General' tab, highlighting that I had not completed required fields to do with error reporting & URL generation – both were set to valid values. I re-read the documentation and re-did the whole installation... just in case I missed something or was too eager to lock down permissions. Again, exactly the same problem. Next, I relaxed ALL the permissions possible, I basically chmod'd the whole thing to 777 - in case the setup wasn't able to write to the config directory but this didn't help either. The FAQ didn't provide much help so i went to the IRC channel #horde @ irc.freenode.net and found others with exactly the same problem holds back the tears of frustration ... But unfortunately no-one seemed to have any immediate answers. On a hunch I grabbed Horde 3.0.7 from the FTP site and went through the whole setup process again. However this time it worked as expected and was running within ten minutes!! Argh... Next step is to diff the code and see where it went wrong... (stay tuned) Update - This issue was fixed in version 3.0.9 which is now available from www.horde.org