User:Enav/Beginners

Welcome to Joomla!, a leading open source Content Management System (CMS) platform. Joomla! is a well-tested, extensible and effective tool supported by a very active and friendly community of developers and users.

This page contain several articles to quickly help you understand the basics of Joomla, and be able to create basic Joomla sites in a short time.

Play with it

Do you want to get started with Joomla!, but you have no idea where to begin? If so, you have come to the right place. The fastest way to learn about Joomla is to start paying with it right now. Visit the demo page and take few minutes to see the demo content and play with the configurations.

Joomla demo page

The first 2 term you need to learn are "Frontend" and "Backend", the Frontent is the part that shows your site content and all the funny stuff and the Backend is the part that contains the configuration views and it is also the place where you normally manage (create, edit, update) your content. To access to your site Backend you just need to add the "/administrators" to your Joomla site domain name in the browser address bar i.e.:

www.example.com/adminisrator

Now that you know how Joomla looks and feel in the frontend and backend is time to you to learn what kind of magic you can do with this new tool of yours.

What can i do with it?

Joomla is a CMS, a system to manage content, if you compare Joomla with an operative systems you can install applications in your computer to do things, same for Joomla, you can install "extensions" to extend and enhance the functions of Joomla.

Joomla comes by default with a bunch of extensions pre-installed and pre-configured to make Joomla works as a News site, but you can manually configure your Joomla site to easily make it works as a:

• Blog site
• Company or Government site
• Contact directory
• Basic product Catalog

Now if your interest is to create more complex sites like:

• eCommerce sites with shopping cart
• Support sites with forums and ticket systems
• News sites with subscription system and comment systems
• Subscription based learning sites

Then you need to install Joomla extensions to make your Vanilla Joomla site the way you need. Lots and lots of extensions are for free with no cost at all, and others are commercial were you need to pay a fee to use them but the normally comes with a tech support deal that will help you save precious time and money, and you know time is gold.

Here at The Joomla Extension Directory you have thousands of extensions to chose from, take some time to visit that site and do few searches to get familiarized with it, you may need to use some more extensions in the future to pimp your Joomla site.

Maybe a client or your boss is asking you for a web solution with a very specific set of requirements and the information so far does not help you to determine if Joomla is suitable for the job, in order to help you not to waste time feel free to visit the Joomla community people and make your question to humans at:

• The official Joomla Forums
• The official ##Joomla IRC channel (aka chat room)
• The official Facebook group

Installing Joomla!

Now you had enough fun playing with the Joomla demo site you may want to go the next level and start messing around with extensions and templates to see how they do in your very own local test server or your rented internet web host.

Requirement

Fist thing to do is to check if your web server meets the Joomla technical requirements, visits this page so see the Joomla requirements table.

If you are not a tech person and you have a rented web server, the easiest way to check if Joomla is compatible with the server you own is to mail the support guys of your hosting company with something like this.

Good day sirs 

I would like to know if the server I rented is capable 
of run a Joomla installation smoothly, this is the 
Joomla Requirement page:

http://www.joomla.org/technical-requirements.html

Thanks for your help, have a nice day

Event the cheapest web host providers normally answer this kind of support questions in less than 3 hours, so relax and wait for the answer.

Now if you are a computer enthusiast and you got in your personal computer a local web server using XAMP, LAMPP or any other and this server is up to date, you can be 99% sure Joomla will run just fine on it just give it a try to see yourself.

Installation on rented servers

There is several ways to install a Joomla copy on a rented web server but the methods and procedures may vary depending on the server provider it configurations and limitations, for example, some web server providers give you the option to do the famous "one click install" it consist on press a button and your web server provider will run an automated script to install a copy of Joomla in your rented web server, if you have hard time finding this options just send a mail to the support guys of your server provider with something like this:

Good day sirs 

I would like to know if your guys have the 
"one click install" option to automatically 
install a pre-configured copy of Joomla in 
the server I rented.

Thanks for your help, have a nice day.

As mentioned before some web server providers have this option and others not, and be aware that some lazy web server providers may have a one click installation option BUT... using a very old and outdated Joomla version.

Having this clear let's say you want to install a Joomla copy manually on your rented web server, if so follow one of this tutorials that suits you better.

• Installing Joomla on a rented web server
• Installing Joomla on a local web server

Note: This tutorials are targeted for non-expert audience, if you need more detailed and advanced information go to the Developers page.