The article is the startup of Joomla Website Development series. I have named the series as “30 Days To Joomla WebSite Setup”. I intend to write almost 30 articles on Joomla Website Setup to help the novice and the experienced to clarify the issues they encounter while setting up Joomla websites. I hope it will be useful for all Joomlers.
Welcome to the Day 1. Here you go…
Introduction To Joomla
Joomla is a Content Management System. It uses php as the programming language and mysql as its back-end database. All of the text content is stored in the database. Rest all of the images, module files, component files and plug-in files are all stored as files in Joomla directories. More on this later.
The word Linux will be used everywhere to make uniformity, although it may be any Unix OS.
Web Hosting
The environment needs to be set up for Joomla installation. In web world two types of hosting is available:
- Windows based
- Linux based
Elements of Web Hosting
Both of these have their own advantages and limitations. For any web-hosting four things are necessary:
- Operating System, which is available as windows, Mac and Linux.
- Web Server to serve the web-pages to client. Apache is the most popular web servers among the free available ones. It comes on windows and Linux as well.
- Database Server. Mysql is the popular and free database system. Others are also available. But currently Joomla supports Mysql.
- PHP, the programming language.
LAMP and WAMP
These four elements are also referred to as LAMP and WAMP.
LAMP is Linux, Apache, Mysql and PHP.
WAMP is Windows, Apache, Mysql and PHP.
WAMP is a freely available and so is LAMP.
Operating Systems
Windows can be used anyone above version Windows 2000. For Linux lots of flavors are available. The popular ones are: RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Suse, Cent OS, Ubuntu. The list is not exhaustive, others are also available.
Browsers
Almost all of the browsers are supported. But the best browser for open source based software sites like Joomla, Word-Press, OSCommerce and Zen-Cart etc. is Firefox. Firefox, I have found is really really very intelligent and adjustable to all types of templates(I’ll introduce you later on).
The others are
- Internet Explorer
- Safari
- Chrome