Website Building 101 Installing Joomla 1.5 RC4 on Bluehost

20Jan08

Ho ho ho. That was fun. Let me boil things down to make a Joomla install hassle free on your virginal Bluehost web space:

  1. Get your fresh hot copy of Joomla. Upload to your site’s public_html folder (or www).
  2. Get your Bluehost side of things prepared:
  • Use cPanel to go to PHP config. Install a php.ini file to you public_html folder. Its automated there in PHP config for you.
  • Use FTP or one of Bluehosts file managers to locate the php.ini.default file in public_html.
  • Make a copy of php.ini.default and put aside. Rename the original file ‘php.ini‘.
  • Set up a mySQL database (its easy, trust me)
    • use cPanel / databases / mySQL database wizard to make a database
    • write the name down, and the password, etc..
  • Set up an email account for your Joomla admin, again, with cPanel
  • Set up an ftp account for your Joomla admin. This is optional but will give you some further protection. I recommed skipping this for now and doing it later.
  • Now unzip your Joomla install into public_html Or unzip it and put everything into public_html later. But it needs to be there, naked, to get your site to use Joomla as the default CMS for your domain.

3. Follow an install guide like the one I have in the next paragraph. This will guide you visually through the install process, which is handy.

4. Done!

That should save you much hassle trying to figure out the error messages you’ll get if you don’t do those things ahead!

The Joomla Install took awhile to figure out. Bluehost doesn’t spam your php.ini file automatically, so… I had to learn how to get this done on their terms, which was not too bad. Ran across many friendly Joomla users (like this person, who’s so enthusiastic even I might cheese up) along the way.

Stupid mistakes: I installed Joomla in my public_html directory, but inside its own folder. For about an hour I had Joomla sitting as a subdirectory of my main page. Whoops! And because of the php.ini running around, I was unsure about moving the install ‘up’ to the main deck. Well, that’s solved, and here’s the Joomla 1.5 RC4 default page

Can you say: “Yummy!”. The CMS looks awesome. Totally worth the research.


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9 Responses to “Website Building 101 Installing Joomla 1.5 RC4 on Bluehost”  

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  1. 1 chemus on February 6, 2008 said:

    Alex, I followed your instructions to the letter and my installation went on so well. Thank you for taking time to put this on the web.

  2. 2 growingfreedom on February 7, 2008 said:

    Thanks chemus. Glad I could help!

  3. 3 therethere on February 8, 2008 said:

    Thanks very much, your info was excellent and worked 1st time!!

  4. 4 Cathy on September 14, 2008 said:

    so what if you have the joomla site designed and done localhost then I want to put it live? How can I do this? The bluehost tech support is pretty useless for me after hours of trying to get some help.

  5. 5 Frank Cahill on September 25, 2008 said:

    Hi Alex,

    I clicked on “Joomla Install” and it seems the link has been moved and may have been deleted. I can’t find it. Can you direct me to it’s new location?

    Thanks,

    Frank

  6. 6 Sam on October 26, 2008 said:

    Alex,

    Thanks for the set up, much obliged. My homepage works, but nothing past it. All the links to articles or other pages in Joomla don’t work. None have restricted access. Any clues?

    Thanks,
    Sam

  7. 7 How to Get Six Pack Fast on April 15, 2009 said:

    The style of writing is very familiar . Have you written guest posts for other blogs?

  8. 8 Pat on April 17, 2009 said:

    Seems your ” here’s the Joomla 1.5 RC4 default page ” link has been hacked. Just a heads up.

  9. 9 Tai Nguyen on May 21, 2009 said:

    The install does not need to be in the document root, only if you want it to have access to your entire domain. It would be a completely valid strategy to have, for example, Joomla installed in one subdirectory and Drupal in another.

    As for the install directions, I found Joomla’s to be totally sufficient – http://help.joomla.org/content/view/1947/302/.


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