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Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Running Without a Hosting Account

You cannot download Joomla and try to run it on your computer like an exe file. It has to have a web server, which means you need to have a hosting account. Sounds obvious, but I have had a couple of people if they needed windows XP to run Joomla!

Now, before we shell out our hard earned money for a hosting account, there is something else you can do first. You can actually run a web server on your local computer, in other words, your desktop or laptop. This is known as having a localhost. It may sound like I just contradicted myself from the previous paragraph, but not quite. You can’t "run" Joomla itself on your own computer, but you can install a localhost web server for it to "run on".

What you need to pull this off is some software that runs Apache, PHP and MySQL on your computer. These are the same software packages that power websites. There are two popular ones, WAMP (www.wampserver.com/en/index.php) and XAMPP (www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html) and they are both free (PGL license)

I am going to quickly run through setting up WAMP, not that this package is windows specific.

Download WAMP from the above link, and then install it. It will create a folder c:/wamp/www

Run WAMP, you should get a handy icon in your system tray:

You need the dial to be white to continue. Note if you run Skype, it interferes with WAMP and so you have to start WAMP without Skype running (and then start Skype if you need it)

Now open a browser and go to localhost (no "www")

You should see the following page:

If you are not seeing this then you should stop and figure out why. You have to get this page before you can proceed. The WAMP site has some helpful troubleshooting FAQ's and a forum.

You should see your folder called "Joomla" in the list of Your Projects. Click on that folder and you will get taken to that "website".

Installing a Joomla Site on a Hosting Account

So let's assume you either have a hosting account, or are going to get yourself one. There are some minimum requirements for Joomla to run, and they are slightly different for the different versions.

Here are the minimum requirements for Joomla 1.0

• PHP 4.2.x or above - www.php.net
• MySQL 3.23.x or above - www.mysql.com
• Apache 1.13.19 or above - www.apache.org

You must ensure that you have MySQL, XML and Zlib support built into your PHP.

help.joomla.org/content/view/34/132/

For Joomla 1.5 it’s recommended you have PHP 4.4.3 or above (for enhanced security).

A thread on the Joomla forums lists various hosting companies who are active Joomla community members. The list can be found at forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,6856.0.html

Note that from now on, the steps are more or less the the same whether you are installing Joomla on a localhost or on a remote web server.

Getting the Joomla Files

This part is easy. Head on over to www.joomla.org and you will see a link to the download section on the home page, it looks like this:

The version number is the number given. This image shows that it's the 11th release in the 1.0 series.

Or you can head straight to the Forge and you will see all possible downloads:

forge.joomla.org/sf/frs/do/viewSummary/projects.joomla/frs

All versions are here as well as various upgrades from one release to another, important if you already have an installation of Joomla.

Important Note:

You cannot upgrade from Joomla 1.0 to Joomla 1.5. There are significant enough changes in the code that simply over writing files would break your site. The developer team has carefully chosen to talk about migration.

"Joomla 1.5 does not provide an upgrade path from earlier versions. Converting an older site to a Joomla 1.5 site requires creation of a new empty site using Joomla 1.5 and then populating the new site with the content from the old site. This migration of content is not a one-to-one process and involves conversions and modifications to the content dump."
dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,33/p,107/

This has been a deliberate choice to minimize the number of users who might attempt the "overwrite the files" technique. More can be found in the forum:

"Joomla 1.5 is so significantly changed from 1.0 that there is no 'upgrade' path. This is the reason that we are providing a migration path. The concept is to build a new site and to migrate data from the old site. Extensions need to be installed and configured as if the site is new. The core data migration does reconstruct menu items for core elements and also keeps core module records with configuration settings."
David Gal - forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,63232.0.html