jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

I just started working with jqGrid. First of all, I want to say that it is rare to find such extensive documentation for an open source component. Thanks so much to whoever has done all this. In working through the tutorial on the this page:

http://www.secondpersonplural....../index.htm

however, I had to make a couple of changes to get it to work for me to retrieve data from the database. I found these problems using Firebug in the Firefox browser on an Ubuntu Linux LAMP VM using the latest downloads. 

I had to change 2 things.

1) In index.php, I had to change

sortname: 'id',

to

sortname: 'invid',

2) In example.php, I had to put the db variables inline rather than from an external file:

//include("dbconfig.php");

    $dbhost = "localhost";
    $dbuser = "root";
    $dbpassword = "xxxxxxxxxxxx";
    $database = "test2";

Perhaps I was doing something wrong in the dbconfig.php file so this might be my mistake, but I just wanted to pass these hints along for anyone else who might run into similar issues.