Setup a new site in Joomla

I don’t know about other Joomla Newbie’s but I find the admin section very difficult to conceptualise.

I’ve been designing websites for ten years now, so my thinking is largely along the lines of containers within css, images, html and all the other stuff that goes to make up pages. Suddenly I’m presented with the totally different concept of user areas etc that Joomla uses.

I find it very difficult to know where these areas are and how to get my articles and images to go where I want them. I think in terms of page layouts - from my print and graphic design days, and I find that the Joomla documentation does not give me the handles I need to get hold of the way that things are done with Joomla.

Before you can complete the setup of Joomla you will need a database so that Joomla can store information about your website. You can choose different database management systems, but by far the most popular is mysql, and that’s the one on my server.

So . . . I set the mysql database up, taking screenshots along the way and put them together into a web page it’s here

Page two of the tutorial added so now it’s complete.

First task was to set up a default Joomla installation - what’s that you may ask?

It’s what you get when you download the latest version of Joomla, then install it. When you do that you get whatever the defaults are in terms of page layout, colours etc. This is the starting point.

A few obvious questions . . .

• how do you add things
• change the stories that are there
• customise the images
• remove whole columns
• change the menus

We will start examining these things next.

Using Wordpress doesn’t seem the right way to be going about this, but I’m familiar with WP, so I can start passing on my experiences of Joomla immediately - as soon as I know enough about Joomla to set up my weblog using it I’ll move over