J1.5:Use Joomla! 1.5 on your own computer

The "J1.5" namespace is an archived namespace. This page contains information for a Joomla! version which is no longer supported. It exists only as a historical reference, it will not be improved and its content may be incomplete and/or contain broken links.

It may seem a little weird to run a website on a computer by itself which is not seen over the internet. It is, however, very useful to be able to learn and experiment on your own machine - not least because you can view the backend and also the files.

Background and experience needed to do this

You need to know a little about computing to do this successfully.

• Know where files are located on your computer and be able to create folders
• You can download something from a website and save it in an appropriate place
• You will not panic if you do not understand a concept!

Experienced developers and people with programming experience will be fine.

A link to Joomla!'s Quick Start Guide

The instructions here make use of the very useful Quick Start Guide. Make sure you look at this as well as this tutorial.

http://help.joomla.org/ghop/feb2008/task048/joomla_15_quickstart.pdf

Summary

There are three basic stages in doing this:-

1. Downloading and installing some software that Joomla! needs to use to run locally. This is a web server called Apache, a database called mySQL and a scripting language called PHP. There are a few other things as well - which are downloaded together as one package called XAMPP.
2. Downloading and installing Joomla!
3. Configuring Joomla!