Joomla 1.5 Quick Start Guide

Joomla! 1.5: Quick Start Guide

Introduction

Hello there! Today, we are going to walk you through setting up your first Joomla! website. In this demonstration, you are going to help set up a website for a landscaping company. In your meeting with the company's president, he described that he would like a section dedicated to trees, another for bushes, and a final for grasses. He would like his own section that will be dedicated to company reports and such. The front page will be reserved for specific material. You also need a section for links, a search page, and a page dedicated to news feeds relevant to landscaping. The public relations director also requested that news feeds be made available for the front page.

In this guide, you will be setting up a website to meet these needs in no time at all!

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XAMPP Setup

In order to set up Joomla! for this website, you first need to have a server installed on which Joomla! can run. The easiest way to set up a server on your own computer is to use XAMPP. If you are installing Joomla! on a web host, please check out the “Official Joomla

1.5 Installation Guide” at http://help.joomla.org. Do not install the sample content and skip ahead to the “Sections, Categories, and Articles” chapter after your installation is complete.

Note: The following instructions are based on a Windows install. Other operating systems will be similar but slightly different. Please refer to the XAMPP installation manual for your operating system.

1. Download the XAMPP installer for your version of Windows from the XAMPP website: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html.

2. After downloading XAMPP, run the setup and follow the given instructions. Installing Apache and MySQL as services is recommended:

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XAMPP Setup

3. Once you have completed the installation, make sure that the installation was successful by visiting http://localhost/. If you have been successful, you should see the following screen:

4. Congratulations, XAMPP is now correctly installed; now let us go get Joomla! setup!

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Download & Unzip Joomla!

Now that you are done setting up the server, it is time to download and unzip Joomla!.

1. First, we need to make a folder for Joomla!. Open the folder that you installed XAMPP into – usually C:\XAMPP or C:\Program Files\XAMPP on Windows.

2. Open up the folder “htdocs:”

3. Create a new folder in “htdocs” titled “joomla15.”

4. Now we need to download the latest copy of Joomla! 1.5 from the net. Go to http://

www.joomla.org and scroll down the left hand side to find “Download Latest” and

click on “1.5” to open the download page:

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Download & Unzip Joomla!

5. Then choose the file with the “.zip” ending:

6. After completing the download, use your favorite program to unzip the files into the “joomla15” directory that we created:

Great! Now we are ready to setup Joomla!.

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Joomla! Installation

Installing Joomla! is a simple thing.

1. First, go to http://localhost/joomla15.

2. Select your language on step 1 and press “Next” at the top.

3. Make sure that there are no red items on step 2 (if you set up with XAMPP, you should already be fine) and press “Next” to proceed.

4. Read over the license in step 3 and press “Next.”

5. On the “Database Configuration” page, enter the following details, then press “Next:”

Joomla! Installation

6. Skip over step 5 and press “Next” to proceed to step 6.

7. Enter the site name “Landscape Smart!”, then the e-mail address and admin password of your choice. NOTE: DO NOT PRESS “Install Sample Data!”

8. Press “Next” to complete the installation.

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Joomla! Installation

9. IMPORTANT: Open up the location where you unzipped Joomla! (usually

C:\XAMPP\htdocs\joomla15 or C:\Program Files\XAMPP\htdocs\joomla15) and

delete the “installation” directory:

10.Return back to the installer and click on “Site.”

If you completed the install successfully, you should now see a blank page ready for all your Joomla! content!

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Sections, Categories, and Articles

One of the most important parts of a website is the content. Now that we have a blank site setup, let us get some articles on the site! Articles are sorted in two ways: sections and categories. Sections can contain numerous categories, and categories can contain numerous articles.

1. To add a section to your website, go to http://localhost/joomla15/administrator and log in with the username “admin” and the password you specified during the installation.

2. To begin managing sections, click on section manager:

3. Click on “New” on the Joomla! toolbar.

4. Insert a title and description for the section and then press “Save” on the toolbar.

5. Create as many sections as you need. Use sections to group generally similar items together into groups. For our landscaping site, add a section for “Corporate” and a section for “Products.”

6. Click on “Content” on the menu and select “Category Manager” when you are done with sections.

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Sections, Categories, and Articles

7. Follow the same steps to create categories, assigning each to one of the sections created above. Use categories for more specific groupings. For the “Products” section, create a category for “Trees,” “Bushes,” and one for “Grasses.” Under “Corporate,” create a “President” category:

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Sections, Categories, and Articles

8. Finally, we need to create some articles. Click on “Content,” then “Article Manager,” and select “New” from the toolbar.

9. This is the article screen. There are a lot of different things you can do here:

○ Add a title for the article, and put it into a section and category.

○ You have the option to publish or un-publish your article, as well as the choice

whether to display the article on the front page.

○ The large box is for the article's contents.

■ You can use the “page break” button to divide the article into pages.

■ You can use the “read more” to divide the article into the section to display in

a summary view and full view.

■ You can use the “image” button to insert an image into your article using the

simple upload form in combination with Joomla!'s media manager.

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Sections, Categories, and Articles

10.For the landscaping website, create five different articles in each of our categories. Use the “read more” button to divide each article into introductory information and then full content. From each category, choose two items to display on the front page using the “Front Page” toggle switch:

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Sections, Categories, and Articles

11. When you are done typing each article, click “Save” to save it and return to the article manager, or “Apply” to save it and continue editing. If you selected “yes” for “Front Page,” then your article will show up on the home page: http://localhost/joomla15/:

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Users

Next, the company president as well as the public relations director and product manager are all going to need to be able to edit the website, so we need to create logins for them.

1. First, go to http://localhost/joomla15/administrator and log in with the username “admin” and the password you specified during the installation. If you are already logged in, go to the “Site” menu and select “Control Panel.”

2. Click on “User Manager:”

Users

3. Click on “New” from the Joomla! toolbar.

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Joomla 1.5 Quick Start Guide

Specifications and Main Features

Frequently Asked Questions

User Manual

Table of Contents

Introduction

XAMPP Setup

Download & Unzip Joomla!

Joomla! Installation

Sections, Categories, and Articles

Users