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.

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

One thought on “Crikey – what a cool CMA!”

  1. You can now see the fruits of my (current) efforts at http://inskeep.net/joomla/
    I’ve managed to switch my content over (well – most of it) and, while I’m not happy about some of the layout and content organisation stuff, it’s certainly a lot easier to update (and for *others* to update) so I just need to tweak the templates a little… I’ll have to have a chat to Tom about that side of things 🙂

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