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According to it's website, "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."
My background with Joomla: The webmaster of my daughters' Girl Scout Service Unit is leaving town, so they needed someone to take over. My wife asked me to do it, but I didn't want to run a site where I was the one who made all the updates. I looked for something that would let me administer a website, but let others add content. I came across a few choices of CMSs, including Joomla, Drupal, and Mambo. I chose Joomla, as it seemed to me to be the most complete system (your mileage/opinion may vary).
I've been thinking about writing this Instructable for a little bit, but was inspired by bunglesmate's recent Instructable to actually sit down and do it.
My background with Joomla: The webmaster of my daughters' Girl Scout Service Unit is leaving town, so they needed someone to take over. My wife asked me to do it, but I didn't want to run a site where I was the one who made all the updates. I looked for something that would let me administer a website, but let others add content. I came across a few choices of CMSs, including Joomla, Drupal, and Mambo. I chose Joomla, as it seemed to me to be the most complete system (your mileage/opinion may vary).
I've been thinking about writing this Instructable for a little bit, but was inspired by bunglesmate's recent Instructable to actually sit down and do it.
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Signing UpStep 1Software requirements
In order to run Joomla you need some sort of web server, PHP and MySQL. If you're not sure what these are, you might be in over your head here, but I'll explain what they are, and what we'll be using, as it really is pretty simple to get up and running.
Web server: A web server is a program that serves up web pages. Your browser (what you're most likely looking at this Instructable in) loads up web pages. To do this, you go to an address, such as http://www.instructables.com. Your browser than talks to the web server at that address, which sends back a web page, which in turn displays the page for you to see. (Yes, I know it can be much more complicated than that, but we'll stick with that for our purposes here.) We will be using a web server called Apache.
PHP: PHP is a scripting (programming) language that lets you write "programs" that run on the web server, and end up sending dynamic information to the web browser. For instance, let's say you go to a web page, and fill out a form with your personal information. That information has to be checked to make sure it's filled in completely. You can use PHP to process the data that was sent in, and make sure that it was all filled out completely, then, based on the information that was submitted, bring the user to web page specific to them. You won't be doing any actual coding for Joomla, but you need PHP installed to make Joomla work.
MySQL: MySQL is a database, plain and simple. It's going to store the actual contents of the website you'll eventually build with Joomla.
Joomla requires certain version of these software products, and those requirements can be found on the Joomla website.
Web server: A web server is a program that serves up web pages. Your browser (what you're most likely looking at this Instructable in) loads up web pages. To do this, you go to an address, such as http://www.instructables.com. Your browser than talks to the web server at that address, which sends back a web page, which in turn displays the page for you to see. (Yes, I know it can be much more complicated than that, but we'll stick with that for our purposes here.) We will be using a web server called Apache.
PHP: PHP is a scripting (programming) language that lets you write "programs" that run on the web server, and end up sending dynamic information to the web browser. For instance, let's say you go to a web page, and fill out a form with your personal information. That information has to be checked to make sure it's filled in completely. You can use PHP to process the data that was sent in, and make sure that it was all filled out completely, then, based on the information that was submitted, bring the user to web page specific to them. You won't be doing any actual coding for Joomla, but you need PHP installed to make Joomla work.
MySQL: MySQL is a database, plain and simple. It's going to store the actual contents of the website you'll eventually build with Joomla.
Joomla requires certain version of these software products, and those requirements can be found on the Joomla website.
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L
My background with Joomla: The webmaster of my daughters' Girl Scout Service Unit is leaving town, so they needed someone to take over. My wife asked me to do it, but I didn't want to run a site where I was the one who made all the updates. I looked for something that would let me administer a website, but let others add content. I came across a few choices of CMSs, including Joomla, Drupal, and Mambo. I chose Joomla, as it seemed to me to be the most complete system (your mileage/opinion may vary).
I guess that also covers my take on what Joomla actually is, and what it does, doesn't it?
L