Joomla tutorial – installing templates and extensions

Joomla tutorial – installing templates and extensions
Joomla programmers have done a smart thing and included an installer for the various themes, components, modules and mambots. This will make Joomla customization easier (at least at first).

Ok! For this tutorial we’re going to need some templates, which you can get from Ty2u.com for free, and various extensions from the Joomla Extensions site. Take a look and download something that interests you and then download them. As a template I’m using Vivacious and as an extension Fireboard Forum, which I’ve already downloaded.

Joomla tutorial – installation

Joomla tutorial – installation
Installing Joomla is just as simple as installing Drupal or WordPress, but it’s still nice to have some images to help out a new webmaster. For this tutorial you should download the latest stable Joomla; for this tutorial I am using Joomla 1.0.12 but webmasters interested in the 1.0.x versions shouldn’t worry as the diferences between the installers are small.

Let’s start the tutorial:

WordPress tutorial – installing themes and plugins

WordPress tutorial – installing themes and plugins
WordPress is the most used blogging platform on the net today, in part because of the astounding array of themes and plugins. After installation almost always there is some form of customization, so let’s see how to install WordPress extensions. You can get themes from Themes.wordpress.net and Plugins from the WordPress.org Plugins page.

WordPress tutorial – installation

WordPress tutorial – installation

WordPress is one of the most used blogging platforms on the Internet for two reasons: it’s very easy to use and it does what it’s supposed to when it should. No wonder then that the installation is dead easy too.

1. Get the latest stable release from the WordPress official site and download it to your computer. You can either extract the files on your computer and upload them to the server with the help of a FTP program upload the upload the archive to the server and extract the files there.

note: when you’ll open the archive, you will see that all the files are in a folder called “wordpress”. If you want to install it in a folder it’s ok this way, but if you want WordPress in the site root then you must rearchive the files so that they aren’t contained in the “wordpress” folder – this way when you extract the files on your server the index.php file will be in the site root.

Drupal taxonomy, drupal nodes and other terms – what do they mean?

Drupal tutorial

Drupal is a very powerful content management system but it’s pretty clear that beginners have a though time using it, and the Drupal specific terms aren’t at all helpful. Yes, the taxonomy system is how content is categorized but why the hell don’t they just say categories?

What are nodes, pages, stories, blocks and all those other terms that Drupal is using?

Drupal tutorial – installing themes and modules

Drupal tutorial – installing themes and modules

Now that you have clean Drupal install it’s time to start customizing. The best way for this is to look for the modules that will give your site the functionality you want it to have and then grab a theme that looks nice and fits your needs.

The first thing you should do is to go to Drupal’s main site and take a look at the available themes and modules. Pick the ones that you want and download them to your desktop; be careful to download the versions that match you installation – modules for Drupal 4.7 will have a “4.7-” in the name and ones for Drupal 5.x will have a “5.x-” in the filename.

So, now that you have the files on your desktop follow the next steps:

Drupal tutorial – installation

Drupal tutorial – installation
For this install I assume that you have a server that has Apache, PHP and MySQL installed (it doesn’t matter if it’s on Windows or Linux). Also, most modern hosting companies offer Cpanel and PhpMyAdmin so I’ll use them in my tutorials.

Here’s how to install Drupal: