Up and Running with Joomla, 2nd Edition

Satisfying the Prerequisites

Before we can get started working with Joomla directly, make sure your computer has the required software and components to run the system. It would be very easy for us to spend numerous pages talking you through the individual installation steps for each of the prerequisites, but in the interest of time we are going to make some assumptions about what you already have installed. They are as follows:

• You have a web server, such as Apache's HTTP Server (http://httpd.apache.org) or Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) (http://www.iis.net), to serve the pages.

• You have PHP (http://www.php.net), which is the web development language that has been used to create Joomla and is required to process requests.

• You have MySQL (http://www.mysql.com) database, which is an open source and freely available package.

• You have Joomla (http://www.joomla.org), the Content Management System (CMS) we are covering in this Short Cut.

Figure 1 provides a look at this from a layout perspective, often referred to as the stack. In the figure you can see that the Joomla architecture has several core groups, including Templates, Languages, Components, Modules, and Mambots. We will cover these in Section 4 of the Short Cut.

Figure 1. Joomla deployment stack

WAMP, MAMP, and LAMP—An Alternative

Before we dive into each of the individual requirements you need to run Joomla, let us first ...