Joseph Brower

We all want to have a website.  We all want to keep it up to date, and we don’t want to have to drop a load of money or time.  Joomla is one of many excellent solutions that the Open Source world has graciously provided for us.  I’m hoping that by the time you finish reading this that you’ll feel comfortable enough to give Joomla a whirl.

First off, like any application, there are some requirements.  You will need a webserver capable of processing PHP (apache does well) and a MySQL database server.  That is all that is requierd.  Most canned hosting solutions do well and are very affordable.  I use Dreamhost and they have done a very good job.

Once you have your server, you will download Joomla (At the time of this writing the latest version was 1.5.7.  You will extract it to your webroot and then try to browse to where extracted it and it will begin the installation.  You will also want to add a database to your MySQL server.  The installation is very straightforward.  Just fill in the blank and hit next.  Since this is probably your first time using Joomla, I suggest that you install the sample data.  This will give you something to work with while you are learning. After you get through the installation, Joomla will remind you to remove the installation folder  In fact, it won’t let you start doing anything with your site until you do.  Go ahead and delete.  Now you have Joomla installed and the fun begins.

The first thing that you shuld do is open up a few tabs in your browser.  You will want one going to where you installed Joomla and you will want anothjer going to the administration folder insid of where you installed it.  So if you installed in www.example.com, you would go to www.example.com/administrator.  You will then log in as “admin” and you will use the password that you specified during installation.  after getting into the administrative panel, I suggest you start to tinker around a bit.  You will want to pay close attention to the Menu (Yes, there is a “Menu” menu) and pay close attention to the article manager.  Once you get a good feel for it by adding and removing things, the you’ll be ready for my next post.  Until then, let me know what you thought and how you think that I can improve

You know, I always wanted to say that but never had a chance… I’ll
just blame it on the lag.

Anyways… let’s get onto the topic of today’s post: this blog. I
figured that it was about time that I find a place to put all of my
random thoughts for the world to see.

2′ll be trying to read every comment and take any suggestions that
people offer. My focus though, will always be technology,
specifically open souce technology. You can see some of the projects
that I’m involved with in the links section on the sidebar. I
encourage you to check them out and contribute if you can.

That’s all for tonight. I’ll try to post next time something
newsworthy happens in my life or I just get bored.