Joomla!

My Top 3

Joomla! is a great CMS software and most of all, it is open source. A few days ago, I hadn’t even heard if it and now I have it running on my server and it is great. My website http://ronit.in is now completely based on Joomla! To install Joomla, you need the following:-

• Web Server with atleast 20 Mb free space
• MySql 3.23.x or above
• PHP 4.3.10 or above with gZip support
• Apache 1.3 or above

Download is for free here.

Also, other that this there are some problems with CSS page rendering in IE, but then open source has never been very IE friendly. Upload took some time as there are more than 3000 files. Installation is very easy and user friendly and can be done from within the browser. Prior to installation you will need to do create a database in MYSQL. You can create a database exclusively for Joomla, or share it with some other application like wordpress. In such a case, make sure to append something to the table names for the other apps as the normal web browser installation of Joomla! doesn’t support this. Durint the web browser installation of Joomla!, it will automatically detect if your server meets the minimum requirements or not and ask for the following name, username and password

Installation takes only a few minutes and is easier than installing most softwares. After that you just need to delete the installation folder and you are ready to go.

The administration interface needs some getting used to but most people should get the hang of it in a day or two. You can fully customize the modules on the front page and can download and choose other templates. One of the great features is that you can install plugins, components & templates by directly uploading the .zip file or by specifying the web link to the file. Joomla! automatically copies, extracts and installs the component then. It took me a lot of time to change the default page title “Welcome to the Frontpage” which can be done by editing the Main Menu–>Home Menu. Also the default logo is in a .png format in the folder Joomla Installation template(default You can specify a different logo and change the resolution by editing the template.css file in Joomla Installation template(default rhuk_milkyway)–>css folder.

I am trying to find out other functional and good plugins for the site right now and will keep updating it from time to time.