Crikey – what a cool CMA!

In a number of my previous roles I’ve developed and led development teams to build some rather significant websites, these were all using enterprise level Content Management Applications (CMA) – my own personal site has however suffered somewhat from the ‘mechanics car’ syndrome and, though it’s had a few random refreshes, I’ve kept it flat, simple HTML, and it’s looked like it too.

Today we had a new guy start in our team and we got to talking about our personal websites and he�s recommended an Open Source content management suite called Joomla which on first view looks almost as good as Toms review. This blog entry will be a run down of my install experience on my Debian test machine.

1. Get the latest Joomla release (and documentation) from http://developer.joomla.org/sf/go/projects.joomla/frs.joomla_1_0
2. Extract the files to the directory you want to run Joomla from:
• cd /var/www/[pathtowebrootandjoomladirectory]/
• tar xvfz Joomla_[version_number].tar.gz
3. Make sure the permissions are set for Web Access
• chown -R www-data:www-data *
• chmod -R 777 *
• (or something a little more secure if that make you feel more comfortable)
4. From a browser, navigate to the Joomla directory and run through the checklist
• http://[server_address]/Joomla/
5. Once the checklist is all in the green, continue on through the pre-install check and license pages by clicking the �Next� button
6. Flick into your SSH connection and setup a Joomla user
• adduser joomla
• mysqladmin --user=root create [databasename] -p
• mysql -u root -e "grant all privileges on [databasename].* to [database_username]@localhost identified by '[database_username_password]'; flush privileges;"
7. Step 1 � MySQL configuration
• Hostname: localhost
• MySQL username: [database_username]
• MySQL Password: [database_username_password]
• MySQL Table Prefix: jos_
8. Step 2 � Site Name
• Enter the name you want for your site
9. Step 3 � Confirm site URL / Path etc
• I just left these as defaults
10. Step 4 � Install complete (Print out the admin login details for filing)
11. Visit the site, heed the warning to delete the install directory (/var/www/Joomla/installation/) I had some weird error so I just used:
• mv /var/www/[pathtowebrootandjoomladirectory]/installation/ /var/www/[pathtowebrootandjoomladirectory]/old.installation/

Note: I had a problem installing with an error �MySQL support Unavailable�. Forums suggest that I should run the following commands:

• apt-get remove --purge mysql-common
• and
• apt-get install mysql-server-4.1
• apt-get install php4-mysql