Installing Joomla

Installing Joomla can often be a subject that scares beginners. Below I will show you just how easy it is. Hopefully the post will show relative newcomers how to install joomla on their web servers

• These are the basic steps that we will follow
• Download the latest Joomla installation in zip format
• Create a database for your website on your hosting package
• Run Akeeba Kickstart
• Run the Joomla Installer
• Delete Installation Folder
• Delete the Joomla zip file and the two Kickstart files

So here are the detailed instructions with screenshots. We are assuming you have apache and mysql installed, if not download XAMPP or WAMP for Windows or MAMP for Macintosh. If using Linux just install using your package manager, e.g. RPM or Aptitude.

Firstly if you need to know more about what Joomla is check out my other post “What is Joomla” here:

or check out Joomla official help documentation “Installing Joomla” here

Download and Installing Joomla

 

1. Go to Joomla.orgClick on the download button

 

2. Pick your Joomla flavour (I’ve chosen Joomla 1.5.23 here)

3. Download it and place in your install locations (if using Apache just create a folder in htdocs and put the zip in there)

4. Extract the zip

6. We will now create a user for the datbase – my chosen username is my_test_joomla. For security reasons it is always better to create a new user for each database with priviliges on that one database.

7. Go to phpmyadmin

8. Click on the “Privileges” tab

9. Click “Add a New User”Enter your username and password and “localhost” in the host field

10. Select “Create database with same name and grant all privileges” so that phpmyadmin will also create a database for use by this user

11. You should see something like this

12. Now it’s time to install joomla

13. Open your browser and go to http://localhost/foldername , where foldername is where you extracted the joomla files above. In my case it is http://localhost/joomla15

14. Select your language

15. Confirm the pre-installation check. If anything in the top section is red you will need to make some changes to your apache config or htaccess

16. Accept the license agreement

17. Now enter your database connection details

18. The next screen is for the ftp connection layer. You will only need to use this if you upload your website to your hosting package via FTP. I’m going to show you a faster way of doing this so leave the setting at “no” and click Next.

19. Enter the name of the website, your email address and a password that you will use to login to the website. Please do choose a decent password with capitals, lowercase and digits as this user will have access to all of the website’s functionality.

20. Unless you are an advanced user please click on the “Install Sample Data” button.

21. Click the Next button. The system will now proceed installing Joomla onto the web server.

Joomla is now installed. Before using it make sure you deleted the installation folder within the website and the zip file

Now yourgallery base website is installed. Time for you to install or develop a theme, add extensions, and content. The idea is for you to develop on your local machine (or elsewhere) and then to upload to your hosting package once it is ready. This will be covered in a later post.

Hopefully this post has been of help showing you how to install Joomla CMS.

Happy Joomlaing!!!