Installing Joomla!

Abstract

You now know that Joomla is a CMS that stores all the information of a website in a database, and it provides a bundle of built-in modules that can be readily added to make a rich web application in a couple of hours. So, let’s go ahead and install Joomla and start playing around with the possibilities that it provides. In this chapter, you will learn how to install Joomla on a local server as well as on a remote server. A remote server is a machine containing special software that is used for hosting your website. These servers are called remote servers because they are found in another location (often a long way away) from where you are, and you usually access them using FTP client software. While the website is under construction, there is no need to run everything on a remote server, and it is much quicker and easier to run the site from your everyday (local) machine. This can be made possible by installing some software on your machine that will make it into a local server ready to test your website on. So, let’s look at setting up a local server, and setting up Joomla to run on that machine.