Joomla is a fantastic content management system that helps you create websites and takes the place of html. We at Be Your Own IT believe in Joomla so much, we rely upon them in creating much of our own web pages.

To begin, you are going to need to install it onto your computer by visiting Joomla.org. Once you have downloaded it, you are going to want to upload it onto your website or server.

Now whenever you extract it, you are going to need to save a blank notepad file called configuration.php to the location where all the Joomla files are located. MAKE SURE YOU SAVE UNDER ALL FILES.

If you want Joomla to be used throughout all of your webpages, you can upload it to your root directory.

Once you have done this, you can go to your browser, and type in the site/joomla (ex: beyourownit.org/joomla)

Your website will ask you your preferred language and if it has any problems. It will then take you through many steps to installing Joomla.

Hi. This is Jeremy from BeYourOwnIT.com with a free web tutorial on how to install Joomla, one of the most popular content management systems on the web. It’s free, extremely robust.

It has about all the extensions and modules and everything you could ever want, the scalability. It’s very easy to use. Most people, you don’t even have to know HTML really to do much with it. It’s great all around. That’s what our BeYourOwnIT.com is built on. Lots of great things.

Your first step is just going to be to download the program. Now remember, content management system like Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, this replaces the need to have HTML files and do a traditional website. This is your website.

So you download the entire full package in version 1.5 to your hard drive. Extract it. It’s a zip file. And then upload it to your website, your server. There’s one thing I’m going to tell you what you need to do.

Wherever you extract it, there’s probably not going to be a file called configuration.php so you need to do is to go to your Programs, Accessories, Notepad and just save a blank file as configuration.php but make sure you save the type as All Files. And save that right in the file folder where you extracted everything so it’s along with all your other Joomla files. Very easy. You’ll see why later.

It will take a while to upload everything to your server. There’s a quicker way but it’s sort of confusing. So you use a favorite FTP program like FileZilla. That’s what we use. And you connect to your server.

Again, if you want your entire website to be Joomla, which is typically the case, you upload it right to the root directory of your website. If you want it segregated to a folder, let’s say you have an existing website but you want to create a new section, maybe a deal section or you have a website already and you want to add Joomla to it, you’d create a folder on your server, maybe called Joomla or Employees section or something like that, and put all the files there.

Either way, the process is the same. Once it’s all uploaded, all you have to do is re‑upload it to a Joomla folder at BeYourOwnIT.org. So you just navigate to BeYourOwnIT.org/Joomla, which is where we put it and hit enter. If we put everything on the root, it would just be on the root. So we would just go to BeYourOwnIT.org.

OK, it’s going to load up the installation. You’re going to select your language and just hit Next. And here’s where it’s going to check if there’s any issues. We had Yes. The first time we did it actually it said we got an error on the configuration.php being writeable. One, because it wasn’t there so we had to upload it and two, because it wasn’t writeable.

If you ever need to make a file writeable like your configuration.php with your FTP program, you just right click on it. Go to File permissions. This is with FileZilla and you go to Public permissions and you select Write. Once you’re done with the Joomla installation, you want to come back and take that away just for security reasons.

But since everything worked out OK, let’s go ahead and hit Next. This is their license agreement. Feel free to read it or like 99% of people just blindly accept it. Hit Next and now is where you’re going to set the server settings.

It runs on MySQL database in most cases. Your host name is typically localhost. Your username is what you would set up when you created the database in the first place so this one is byoog_train. This is the password. Now this is the password to the database. OK. And this is just as we did earlier.

We also have a video on how to create a database with cPanel too so you watch that first before anything. So this is the database name that we created earlier, the username. 99% of the time this is always going to be localhost so you can just leave it there.

Hopefully we don’t have any issues but we can hit Next. Cross your fingers. Unable to connect to the database. Could not connect to MySQL. So let’s go back and see what’s the error. Username byoog… I know what. We need an RG here. Probably the same problem here. Just a simple typo, thankfully. Hit Next. Fingers crossed. There we go.

Now this is a new feature that wasn’t in the old version of Joomla. It can be a total pain in the butt. Now they want to know like… Due to the file system permission restrictions on Linux and other Unix systems, an FTP layer is used to handle file system manipulation and enable installer so we want to get updates and all that stuff.

They want you to enter an FTP username and password with access to the Joomla root directories. This can be your general FTP user so maybe… I forget what this is. Hopefully it’s… I can remember this. I’m going through this for the first time so I get the same errors you do.

OK, so it’s valid. Warn FTP Path Root. Oh, maybe we’ll do the Autofind FTP Path. All right, maybe we want to point it to the actual folder. Now if you’re installing it to your root, say you want this to run… No, that’s not going to work… All right, so let’s just hit Next. Hopefully this will be all right.

My poor server is getting all sorts of content management system results tonight as we’re doing lots of tutorials. Looks like we’re on the home stretch now. Let’s do the site name. Let’s call it Be Your Own IT Joomla. This is what actually our main site is built on. Just so you know.

This is the email. You want this to be correct because it’s going to send your admin password there. Here’s where you set your admin password. This is where you’re going to log in. This is different than your earlier password because that’s the password to the database.

Install Sample Data strongly recommended for beginners. We’re beginners so let’s install it and hit Next. Finish. Yey! So remember to completely remove the installation directory. You will not be able to proceed beyond this point until the installation directory has been removed.

So let’s look at the FTP. Make sure we’re connected. Let’s go to the Joomla folder. As you can see in this server, we actually have several contact management systems but that’s because we just use this for testing purposes only.

It’s a little slow. All right, so we go to Joomla and here’s the installation directory. We just delete that. This may take a moment but Joomla is all installed and once this is deleted you should be able to continue beyond everything.

Let’s see. Let’s just make sure that it gets rid of all that. I just want to show you that it’s all OK. We can go back to the site now and there you go. So Joomla is now installed at BeYourOwnIT.org/Joomla.

If you have any questions, please email us at support@beyourownit.com. Of course, we’ll be creating loads of new tutorials on how to use Joomla, WordPress and Drupal. We hope that this helped you out. Thanks and have a great night.