Introduction to Joomla
Hey YouTube, It's Quinton here and welcome to my very first tutorial on Joomla. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to download and install Joomla on your local host. And over the next couple of videos, we're actually going to take a look at how to use Joomla, and also we're going to learn what Joomla is capable of doing.
So first of all, what is Joomla? Joomla is one of the most popular CMS's in the world, and CMS stands for Content Management System. This means that we as developers can build this really super awesome website and then go ahead and sell it to a client, and they can easily update content on their website with very little knowledge of HTML. In fact, the client probably won't need to learn HTML at all, and they will still be able to update content on their website. So as a result, if you want to get a job anywhere as a developer, you'll notice that Joomla is almost always going to be one of the requirements. And that's actually why I decided to make this tutorial series. I really thought it would be great to equip you guys with the skills that you need to get a job as a developer.
Okay, so my next thing I want to talk about is why would we use Joomla? Now, other than the fact that it's really easy for clients... wow, this phone's going crazy. Let me just get rid of it. Okay, I threw it across the room now. Uh, where were we? Okay, so why would we use Joomla other than the fact that it's really easy for clients to update their websites themselves after sales? Joomla also has a bunch of really cool tools that can make our lives as developers much, much easier, and this allows us to do our job a lot faster.
So, uh now let's talk about what you need to follow along with the series. And the first thing you're going to need is a good browser. I'm going to use Firefox, but if you guys want to use Chrome, then that's perfectly okay with me. Chrome is going to work just fine. Okay, then you're going to need a good text editor. And as always, I'm going to use Notepad++. That is my trusty text editor. I love it. I love to use it. But if you are on a Mac, then you can't use Notepad++, so I recommend that you switch over to Sublime Text, and I'm going to leave some links in the description below so you can check those out.
Okay, now since I'm going to install Joomla on my Local Host, I also need to install some sort of Apache and PHP software. Now for my tutorials, I'm going to be using XAMPP, and I'm going to leave a link to this in the description below, and I'll also give you a quick run through of what you need to do to install XAMPP later on in this video. Okay, then the last thing you're going to need to do is download and install Joomla. And that is something that we're going to cover in this video as well.
Installing and Configuring XAMPP
So first of all, let's take a look at how to download and install XAMPP. Okay, you're going to need to go over to the apachefriends.org um website and you're going to find a link or a download link to download XAMPP. You can go ahead and click on that and actually just download XAMPP. And if you guys want more details on the installation, I do have a video that covers that, and I'll leave a link to that in the description below. But once you've finished downloading and installing XAMPP, you should land up with a program that looks kind of like this. And one thing we're going to need to do is start our Apache server and then also start our MySQL server.
If you have a problem with Apache not wanting to start, it's probably because you have Skype open and Skype blocks one of the ports that you will need. So, uh, if you have that issue that Apache isn't starting, then you can go ahead and close Skype, or you can go ahead and open Skype and then go to Tools, Options and, uh, Advanced, Connection, and you might want to just untick this box because by default when you install Skype, that box comes ticked, and it blocks Port 80 and 443, which is pretty much the port that we need to run Apache, as you can see we're using ports 80 and 443. So if you have a problem with this not starting, again, just go ahead and either close Skype or disable that setting in Skype, and you should be good to go.
Downloading and Extracting Joomla
Now let's take a look at how to install Joomla. So you're going to go over to the Joomla website which is joomla.org. I'm also going to leave a link in the description below. You can go ahead and click on download. That's going to download a zip file. So once you finished downloading that, you should have a zip file like this somewhere on your computer. I don't know where you saved it. Wherever you chose to save it when you downloaded it, that's where it's going to be.
Then you can go ahead and right-click on that and say extract files, but you want to extract them to a specific location on your computer. Okay, and that location is actually going to be uh, probably Local Disk C or wherever you installed XAMPP. Okay, you're going to have to look for this folder here called xampp and then open that. And inside of a folder called htdocs, that is where you're going to install uh your version of Joomla. Now I'm actually going to create a new folder over here. So let's go new folder, and I'm going to give this folder a name. So we'll just call it uh, Joomla 3.3. And I think I'm going to not have a space in the folder name, so joomla_3.3. Okay, and now this is going to extract all of the files in this uh zip file to that folder. Okay, so we'll just give this a couple seconds to run.
Joomla Installation: Site Configuration
And that should be done. I don't know why I got sort of like that error sound. I don't know if you guys could hear that, probably not. But once that zip is done, or once you've unzipped those files, you can then uh make sure that you're running Apache, so just make sure that that's started, and go over to localhost and then type in the name of the folder that you created. So I called my folder joomla_3.3.
Okay, let's visit that, and you can see it takes me over to uh Joomla 3.3 installation. So here is where I'm going to install Joomla, and you can see that it's actually asking me for a bunch of different settings or uh, bunch of different information rather. Okay, so let's give my site a name. We'll just say Joomla Test. You could call it anything you wanted. Um, let's go ahead and give a description of our site: Testing joomla install for tutorial. Okay, we're going to have to give an email address over here. So uh, you can put in whatever email address you want to. I'm just going to go ahead and enter [email protected] and uh, that is my email address, but I almost never respond to anyone's emails. So if you guys are going to email me, just know that I might not respond.
Okay, uh, let's go ahead and give our website a password, and this is a password that we're going to need to log into our site, um, or into the back end of our website every time we want to modify something in Joomla. And I'm going to go ahead and just make a password of 'password' and we'll confirm the password as 'password'. Okay, site offline, we can leave as 'no' for now. If you really want uh to put your site offline, then you can go ahead and say yes. All it does is make it that nobody else can see the site unless they're trying to log in with admin details.
Joomla Installation: Database Configuration
Okay, let's go ahead and click next. And now I need to set up a database connection. Okay, so that is uh one reason why we might have our SQL running over here, and we're going to have to create a database. So it just so happens that whenever you download and install XAMPP right from the start, then um by default you have a user which is called root, and you have a password which is blank. So if you leave your password blank and you're using the username root, then this should actually be able to connect to the database just fine.
Okay, and now you can go ahead and just give your database a name. So I'm going to say joomla_tutorials. Okay, and Old database process, well, I don't actually have an old database called joomla tutorials, so it doesn't really matter if I click backup or remove, nothing's going to happen anyway, because I don't have an old database. Um, but you might want to just, if you're trying to install over your old database, you might want to remove that or if you really want to back it up, um, that choice is up to you.
Joomla Installation: Finalization & Sample Data
Let's go ahead and click Next. And the last thing is just uh, do we want any sample data when we install um Joomla? So in other words, uh do we want there to be content showing on the front end of our website by default or not? And I'm going to go ahead and choose Default English just so that we can see that there's actually some sort of a website going on, even if it is uh just random Joomla information. So just go ahead and click Default English if you want your website to be the same as mine. Email configuration, we'll just leave that, and the rest of the stuff, this is all um Joomla defaults and we can leave them as they are. Okay, go ahead and click Install, and this is going to run for a few minutes. But once it's done, Joomla should be installed. So I'm going to let this run and I'll get back to you once it's done.
Troubleshooting a Timed-Out Installation
Okay, so my installation's now done, and I can go ahead and click on remove installation folder. Okay, and here's a um situation, or here's actually a point where you guys might actually have a little bit of a problem, because sometimes with XAMPP, you might not be able to complete this installation. It'll just keep loading and loading forever. And um, if it takes longer than 10 minutes or, you know, 15 minutes, then I'd say you really need to try take a look at this problem or the solution that I'm going to show you.
So I've got a link that I'm going to leave in the description below, and uh this link is basically just a link to a Joomla forum. And uh, if you if you visit the page, you're actually going to start from up here at the top, but the solution to the problem is actually all the way down here where someone tells you you need to look for these two lines of code. Okay, so what you actually have to do is go over to your computer, okay, Local disk C, go to your XAMPP folder, and hit Ctrl-F, search for php.ini and then go ahead and open that up. Okay, that should actually open up a text document, and if I just resize this so we can see it a little bit better, if I hit Ctrl-F over here and search for max_execution, okay, that is uh what they asked us to do here in the forum, search for max_execution. So I'm going to search for that. I can see that max_execution is set to 3000, which is actually exactly what he said we need to set it to in the forum. So max_execution_time 3000, and we also need to search for memory limits. So let's go ahead and search for that. Memory, go ahead and say next. And there we go. We've got maximum_memory_script is uh set to 128, there it is there. Okay. So, uh, this is probably going to be like this by default, the memory limit, but my execution time, uh, which was actually only a few lines above, um I had to change that to 3000 and then my installation would work. Before, my PHP or my Joomla installation wouldn't work uh when I had this at its default value.
Okay, after that you're going to want to go ahead and save the changes that you made and close that and hopefully you should be done with your php.ini file. Okay, so that's just a little problem that you guys might have picked up while following this tutorial. Hopefully you didn't, but if you did, uh just make sure that you restart um Apache. In other words, you're going to have to click stop and start and then actually restart your installation from the beginning again if that problem did happen to you.
Exploring Your New Joomla Site
Okay, uh but if that problem didn't happen, then you should be able to go ahead and remove all of this and go back to just localhost and whatever you call your folder, go ahead and hit enter, and that is going to take you to your awesome website. So as you can see, this is actually the website that we just made. It's uh just the standard Joomla um or the default Joomla website once you have finished installing Joomla. Okay, and you can see that we've got our big heading over here. We've got a navigation, a little banner image, um and then an aside with some content over here as well.
Accessing the Joomla Backend (Administrator)
Okay, and if I go ahead and type in /administrator, so go ahead and type in localhost, the folder that you uh created, and then /administrator, and that is going to take you to the back end of your website. So here we can log into Joomla and these will be with the details uh that you supplied uh whenever setting up Joomla, which I think I actually put in my email address which was [email protected] and my password which is uh password I think. Okay, and then I can log in to Joomla. So take a look at that.
And this is the back end of Joomla. Uh this is where we're going to be spending the next few tutorials, just learning how to use Joomla and also just taking a look at what we can do with Joomla. And that's all I have for you in this tutorial. So don't forget to subscribe. Please feel free to leave a comment, like, or share this video. It's really going to help my channel grow, and I will see you guys next time.
