Joomla! Documentation™

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 It exists only as a historical reference, it will not be improved and its content may be incomplete and/or contain broken links.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

Experience needed

Not everyone using this Manual will have enough experience to feel comfortable doing this. You need to know a little about computing, for example:-

• 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. If in doubt - follow the instructions and try it!

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!