TERCER ENFOQUE ACTIVIDADES DIDÁCTICAS EXPRESIVAS Y

We can now go ahead and configure Joomla. Using your web browser, surf to the Joomla installation that you copied to the server earlier. Assuming you uploaded it to a folder called joomla, the address will be www.yoursite.com/joomla or something similar. In my case, it’s www.the-web-book.com/joomla, which brings up a page like this:

Choose a language (English, presumably), and press the Next button, to begin the pre- installation check. Here, Joomla checks various things on your server, to ensure that you have the right versions of PHP (the programming language in which Joomla is written) and MySQL. It also makes a number of other checks. If any of these fails, check the support pages on your web host’s site in order to find out how to resolve the problem.

The only warning is that the setting for Display Errors is turned on, where Joomla recommends that it’s turned off. This is relatively minor. It means that, if Joomla crashes, someone who’s visiting the site at the time might see an error message. This is unprofessional, and a minor security risk. We can live with this, so we’ll click the Next button and move on to the licence agreement screen. Read it, then click Next.

Now comes the most important screen, which is to do with our database configuration. Fill it in as follows:

In the Database Type box, choose MySQL.

For the host name, type localhost. This tells Joomla that the database server is the same machine as the web server. This is not always the case – it depends on your web hosting company. If you have problems making Joomla work, check your host’s support site, or the email that was sent when you signed up, to find out the address of your MySQL server. For the username and password, use the same ones that you use to connect to your hosting control panel.

For the database name, use the one that you created on page 140 (thewebbo_cms in this case).

Finally, go to the Advanced Settings box. Tick the "delete existing tables" entry, just to be neat.

Choose joomla_ for the table prefix. Within a MySQL database there can be more than one table, just as there can be multiple Excel spreadsheets within one workbook. Joomla creates various tables for itself, to store sets of data such as web pages, user details, page counters and so on. By specifying a table prefix, all of the Joomla-related tables within the database

will be clearly identifiable because they have joomla_ at the start of their name. When we come on to install other products later, we’ll use a separate table prefix such as wordpress_ or plogger_. This is the way that we can allow multiple programs to share one database – they all have their own tables with their own prefixes. So even if both Joomla and Wordpress wanted to create a table called users, they’d actually end up being called joomla_users and wordpress_users, thus avoiding any conflicts.

With everything entered, press the Next button.

Joomla now needs to know a username and password that it can use to communicate with your web server via FTP. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use our site-wide account that we use for accessing the control panel and the MySQL database:

Tick the box to enable the FTP layer, then enter your site username and password again. Then, rather than filling on the FTP Root Path entry, just click the Autofind FTP Path button and Joomla will do the hard work for you. In this case the result is /public_html/joomla, which is what we’d expect.

Choose a name for your web site. It doesn’t matter what you choose, as you can always change it later. For now, I’ll call my site Robert’s Joomla Test.

Enter your email address where asked, and then choose an admin password for your Joomla site. The username will be admin (you can’t change this). Make sure you remember this, as you’ll need it to log into your Joomla CMS to maintain or create pages. In this demo site I’ve chosen a password of poltergeist.

Before you go any further, click the Install Sample Data button. This will create some sample content in your CMS, rather than leaving you with an empty CMS that contains no pages at all. Having done so, and with the "Sample data installed successfully" message displayed, click the Next button.

Hopefully, you should now have a working Joomla installation. The final screen of the configuration section looks like this:

Before you can use Joomla, you need to heed the message and delete the installation folder from your web server. This is a security precaution. If you don’t do this, someone could surf to that folder and re-install Joomla from scratch, just like we have done. By choosing their own admin password, they could also lock you out of your own CMS.

So, close your Web browser and open FileZilla. Connect to your server. On the right hand side of the screen, which shows the remote site, double-click on the public_html folder to open it. Then open the joomla folder. Then right-click on the installation folder and choose Delete. Wait for a minute or two until FileZilla has finished deleting all of the files from the installation folder on the server, then close the program and return to your desktop.