Beginner's Guide

You rent a server from a provider and install the operating system of your choice. You are the
administrator of the system and you can work on it, just like on your PC at home.
Before you venture into the wilderness of the Internet, you should first practice on your local
computer. This has the advantage that there are no connection fees, it is very fast, and you can practice
at a leisurely pace.
You may even have a small local network at home where you can install Joomla on one computer
and access it from another.
Remember that there are probably more current versions on the respective project sites on the
Internet.
STUMBLING STONES
This topic is very complex because there is a vast number of providers and an even greater number
of installed web server, PHP, MySQL versions and web space management tools. Crunchpoints during
the installation often consist of:
•
an activated PHP Safe Mode, preventing you to upload files,
•
'forbidden' rewrite paths with the Apache web server because the so-called Apache Rewrite Engine
(mod_rewrite) is not activated,
•
the directory permissions on Linux and OSX, which are set differently than in Windows.
Basically, the easiest way that almost always works, is the following:
•
Download the current file package from joomla.org to your home PC and unzip everything into a
temporary directory.
•
Load the unpacked files via FTP onto your rented server or to the directory of your local installation.
The files must be installed in the public directory. These directories are usually called htdocs, public_html
or html. If there already are other installations in that directory, you can specify a sub directory in
which your Joomla files should be installed. Many web hosts allows you to link your rented domain
name to a directory.
•
You have to find out the name of your database. In most cases, one or more databases are included in
your web hosting package. Sometimes, the names of the user, database and password are already
given; sometimes you have to set them up first. Usually you can do this in a browser-based
configuration interface. You will need the database access information for Joomla's web installer.
JOOMLA WEB INSTALLER
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide
Monday, 30 January 2012! Page 38