Joomla is a widely used content management system (CMS).

It's wise to have a database dedicated to Joomla. Let's go crazy, and call it “joomla”.

If you don't (yet) know how to go about this, please read this tutorial.

You have a choice here. For “neatness'” sake, such applications are generally placed in a folder within the www sub-domain (www.example.com/joomla) or in a specific sub-domain of its own (joomla.example.com).

Easy! Just make sure the you create a specific folder for the store (as in www.example.com/joomla)

Two things to do:

• Configure your server for this sub-domain, as explained in this tutorial.
• Configure your sub-domain to point to the server you have just configured, as explained in this tutorial.

This is the option we will be using in the rest of the tutorial.

To begin with, we need to download it. At the time of writing, the latest version was 1.6.0.

Nothing beats the official site to get the initial compressed file. I therefore recommend this link.

Now that you've downloaded the file onto your favorite hard drive, decompress it. You now have a folder (let's rename it joomla) containing all of the Joomla files.

Launch your favorite FTP client (we recommend FileZilla) and log in as admin onto your server. Then, open the folder corresponding to the VirtualHost you had initially defined.

In our example, the path of the FTP would therefore be:

/srv/d_my-gandai-ai/www/joomla.example.com/htdocs

…that is, unless you've changed the initial configuration of the web files. If that's the case, however, I'm assuming you knew what you were doing. :)

At this stage, we can upload the Joomla files onto your server.

• If you created a joomla.example.com kind of virtual host, you will wantJoomla to come up as the front page (i.e. not within a folder in the sub-domain) and you should therefore upload the content of the joomla folder into the htdocs folder of your sub-domain.
• If you're not a fan of sub-domains and prefer a good old example.com/joomla, then you need to upload the complete folder into htdocs (or another folder if you want).

For Joomla to configure properly, certain folders and files will need specific rights. In most cases, to change these rights with your FTP client, all you need to do is right-click on the file concerned and chose the right term in the menu (could be Rights, CHMOD, Properties…). Supposing you were using FileZilla, this is how the client would operate:

Right-click the concerned file and select “File Attributes…”. The window that has just opened gives you two different methods to change the file rights: boxes to tick and numeric values.

The point of the tutorial not being to teach the numeric values of rights in UNIX, let's just say you can simply replace the numeric value by 777.

The following files and folders will need its rights changed:

administrator/backups
administrator/components
administrator/modules
administrator/templates
cache/
components/
images/
images/banners
images/stories
language/
mambots/
mambots/content
mambots/editors
mambots/editors x-td
mambots/search
mambots/system
media/
modules/
template/

You can now open your web browser and log on to your Joomla directory (joomla.yourwebsite.com; www.yourwebsite.com/joomla…).

If Joomla has been properly uploaded onto your server, and that the rights have been properly granted to the relevant folders and files as explained above, you should be allowed to click the Next button.

Joomla will ask for information regarding its database. Therefore, make sure that you have created a database as explained in the very beginning of this tutorial.

Fill in the fields as such:

Server name: localhost

Username: The username associated to the database…

Password: …and its password

Database name: If you have been following our example, it should have been called joomla.

Table prefix: Leave the default value in this field, unless you know what you are doing and have a good reason to do otherwise :)

As the text on the Joomla interface indicates itself, you are advised to leave the default values for the remaining files.

Website name: That's entirely up to you.

URL: Joomla will suggest a predefined URL which corresponds to Joomla's file path on your server, so you can leave this field's default value.

Path: This is the FTP path for Joomla's folder, so you can leave the default value here as well.

E-mail: Put down the e-mail of the person who will be in charge of this Joomla platform.

Admin: Pick a username for the administrator's account.

Password: …and a password for this account.

The following fields pertain to the permissions to be granted to the Joomla folders, and you can choose to leave these fields with their default values.

Joomla won't work until you've deleted the /installation folder, inside Joomla's folder.

Don't forget to delete with your FTP client.