Install joomla 1.5

From VNOHosting

Introducing Joomla 1.5

Joomla, one of the best Open-Source Content Management Systems that has been extensively developed and tested to result an effective tool for you to work with. With its user-friendly interface, Joomla makes your life easier in managing your site, posting your articles, and dividing your website to categories, thus creating a reliable communication channel with your visitors.

This article is a step-by-step guide that starts by introducing you to Joomla 1.5, helps you installing Joomla 1.5, guides you to fine tune your website, and ends up in backing up your Joomla 1.5 website.

Installing Joomla 1.5 using Fantastico De Luxe

• Step 1: Login to your Admin cPanel http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel
• Step 2: Locate and click on the Fantastico De Luxe Icon
• Step 3: Under the “Content Management” section, find and click on Joomla 1.5
• Step 4: In the right panel, select “New Installation”.
• Step 5: on page 1 of the installation process, you will be prompted for the installation directory. To have Joomla installed on your website’s main page (http://www.yourdomain.com) leave it blank else, insert the directory of your choice (http://www.yourdomain.com/joomla). Also fill out the Admin access data. Finally, click on “Install Joomla”.

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• Step 6: on page 2, a summary of the installation options is displayed, including database details and the installation directory chosen.

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• Step 7: Click on “Finish Installation” button to successfully complete your Joomla 1.5 installation process.

Installing Joomla 1.5 Manually via Web Interface

• Step 1: Download Joomla 1.5 latest release to your desktop from the official Joomla website: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/
• Step 2: Uncompress the downloaded file to a specified directory on your desktop.
• Step 3: Upload the extracted files to your web hosting account via FTP to a specified directory of your choice (e.g. /joomla).
• Step 4: From within the cPanel interface of your hosting account, create a new database using the “MySQL Database Wizard”. Please do save all the information used in this wizard from usernames and passwords for future use.
• Step 5: Using your browser, go to the location of your newly uploaded files (Step 3):http://www.yourdomain.com/joomla

Once you are there, the Joomla Step 1 - Web Installation will be displayed.

• Step 7: Here comes the GNU GPL v2 License under which all Joomla releases have been made to date. Read and click “NEXT”
• Step 8: Basic settings of the database configuration. The information required here are the ones you previously saved when you were creating your database with MySQL Database Wizard.

• Step 10: Here is the last page before you finish your full installation of Joomla 1.5. This page is divided into 3 sections:
  • Section A: Site Name
  • Section B: Super Administrator
  • Section C: Sample Data

All of the three sections allow the settings of three critical elements for the Joomla 1.5 installation. Fill out all the required information and click “Next”.

• Step 11: Reaching this pages means that you have successfully installed Joomla 1.5. On the other hand, one more additional security step is required. Go to the Joomla 1.5 directory via the cPanel FileManager or via FTP and DELETE the folder named: “installation”

Edit and manage your Joomla 1.5 website: Sections – Categories - Articles

Now that you have installed Joomla 1.5 successfully, you will need to manage it, maybe divide it into sections and categories, or maybe post some articles in order to make your site rich with information.

• Step 1: Login to the admin cPanel using your username and password: (http://www.yourdomain.com/joomla/administrator)
• Step 2: Locate and click on “Section Manager”. Once inside, click “New” to create a new section.
• Step 3: Repeat the previous step but now for “Category Manager”. Once inside, group the sections accordingly.
• Step 4: After we have created Sections and divided them into categories, it’s time to create some articles to enrich our site. Click on “Content” and then on “Article Manager”

Here you will see the articles page. You may see a list of articles where you can edit them, publish/un-publish them and the option to whether display them on the front page or not.

Clicking on the “New” button will allow you to create a new article. After writing an article, don’t forget to click on “Save” so that your article is saved on Joomla 1.5. Now visit your Joomla 1.5 website to see how it looks.

Have it your look with Joomla Templates

One of the main features of Joomla 1.5 is that you can easily tune the look of your website to best fit your taste. Joomla 1.5 comes with 2 default templates; nevertheless you can add more templates of your choice.

To change the template of your Joomla 1.5 website, do the following steps:

• Step 1: Login to Joomla’s 1.5 Administrative Panel.
• Step 2: Go to the “Extensions” menu and select “Template Manager”.
• Step 3: Select the template of your choice and set it to the default, then click save.

Joomla 1.5 Extensions: JoomlaXplorer

A “Hot Extension” on the Joomla official website, JoomlaXplorer provides you with an FTP and a File Manager to cover your needs wherever you are. An open-source extension for Joomla that can be easily installed you and easily used by your clients.

To install VirtueMart, follow these steps:

• Step 1: Go to JoomlaXplorer download page and download the proper file to your desktop.
• Step 2: Login to Joomla’s 1.5 Administrative Panel.
• Step 3: Go to the “Extensions” menu and select “Install/Uninstall”.
• Step 4: In the “Upload Package File” section, click on “Browse”
• Step 5: Locate the .zip that you have just downloaded from Joomla and click “OK”
• Step 6: Click “Upload and Install”

Joomla 1.5 Extensions: Joomla Comment 3.20

One of the most important and most useful tools used in Joomla 1.5. The JoomlaComment’s fast and light functionality along with BBcode, smiley, templates choice and multi-language support distinguishes it from any other extension within its category.

Some of the interesting features of this extension are:

• • Website input
  • Notifications
  • RSS feeds
  • Threaded/nested comments
  • Picture support
  • Emoticons support
  • Front-end/Back-end moderation interface.
  • Multi-language support

Installing JoomlaComment 3.20 is not that complicated.

• Step 1: Go to JoomlaComments 3.20 and download the proper file to your desktop.
• Step 2: Login to Joomla’s 1.5 Administrative Panel.
• Step 3: Go to the “Extensions” menu and select “Install/Uninstall”.
• Step 4: In the “Upload Package File” section, click on “Browse”

• Step 6: Click “Upload and Install”

Joomla’s Search Engine Friendly (SEF)

Everyone wants to have there website(s) listed between the first search results on the search engines. This is not achieved by chance, as it would require some fine tuning of the website in order to reach that goal. This tuning technique is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Having a Joomla 1.5 website, it is possible to do some editing to your website to become Search Engine Friendly (SEF). Continue reading below to find out what are some of the steps that should be taken:

Removing the WWW from the domain name

One of the techniques of SEO is to remove the WWW before your domain name. This means that instead of writing www.yourdomain.com, a user can simply access your website by typing yourdomain.com in his browser. It also helps when you have a subdomain, as it is much flexible to write: subdomain.yourdomain.com instead of www.subdomain.yourdomain.com

In order to remove the WWW before your domain name, all you have to do is to add these lines to your .htaccess file located in your ROOT directory.

Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [nc] rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Note: change yourdomain.com to your real registered domain

In case you do not have the .htaccess file in your root directory, rename the htaccess.txt file that comes with Joomla to .htaccess.

Build your own custom 404 page

Joomla 1.5 gives you the capability to custom the error pages that are displayed. Either “403 Forbidden”, “404 Not Found” or “500 Internal Server”, you can easily customize the look of those pages to best fit your needs.

This is how things work with Joomla. In order to handle the HTTP Status errors, Joomla uses the “templates/system/error.php”. By copying this file to your “/templates/template_name” directory you make it possible for Joomla to use it instead of the system file already in use. Here, you can edit this file to best match your needs.

You can go one step further and change the system style by copying the templates/system/css/error.css file into your templates/template_name/css directory and edit it as required.

Don’t forget to update the error.php file in your template folder to reference to the new error.css file by changing this line:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl; ?>/templates/system/css/error.css" type="text/css" />

Backup and Restore Joomla’s 1.5 Database

The Backup Process

• Step 1: Login to your hosting account cPanel, locate and click on the “PhpMyAdmin” icon.
• Step 2: From within PhpMyAdmin, choose the Joomla’s 1.5 Database.
• Step 3: On the top menu of the database table list, click on “Export”
• Step 4: In the export options, make sure you:
  • “Select All” Tables
  • Check “Structures” property.
  • Check “Data” property.
  • Check “Save as” option
• Step 5: Once you double check that all the options in step 4 are set, click Go and save to the file to your desktop.

The Restore Process

• Step 1: Login to your hosting account cPanel, locate and click on the “PhpMyAdmin” icon.
• Step 2: From within PhpMyAdmin, Create a new database..
• Step 3: Once the database is created, from the top menu of the database table list, click on “Import”
• Step 4: In the import options field, browse for the backup file on your desktop and click “Restore”

Troubleshoot Joomla 1.5

Configuration.php file not writable

One of the most common problems faced when installing Joomla 1.5. You have 3 ways to solve this:

• • Do a manual installation.
  • Inside Joomla’s root directory, create a new empty file and name it configuration.php.
  • At the end of the installation process, specifically Step 7, a list of the variables and settings for the configuration.php file will be displayed. Copy and pasted into a new text document and save it as configuration.php

Register Globals is set to on – Shared Hosting Problem

Upon the pre-installation check of Joomla 1.5, an error may occur. This may happen because your hosting server would have Register Globals On. You can change this by adding either one of the lines to your root directory’s .htaccess file: php_flag register_globals 0 or php_flag register_globals Off

Alternatively, you can try this using the php.ini file:

<?php register_globals=0 ?> Or <?php register_globals= Off ?> or <?php register_globals= "Off" ?>

Place a copy of the php.ini file in both the Joomla’s root directory and the administrator directory under the Joomla’s root directory.

The Famous “500 Internal Error”

There are various possible causes for Joomla 1.5 to display the “500 Internal Error”. Here we will list some of them along with there possible solutions.

1. Wrong .htaccess syntax: You may have some syntax error inside your .htaccess file or you may need to add/remove some lines to it.
2. Web Host Problem: your web hosting company might have some issues with the server you are hosted on. Wait for a while and then try again.