Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 Cookbook

By : Tom Canavan
Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 Cookbook

By: Tom Canavan

Overview of this book

If you are a Joomla! site owner, you must already be aware of how this robust, easy to use, open source content management system can help you build a great looking site instantly. You must also be aware of the many problems that it can throw up from time to time. Find the solutions to all your basic and advanced Joomla! queries, so you don't have to wait for someone on the forums to help you out every time.The Joomla! 1.5 Cookbook will provide you with quick and direct solutions to the most common and uncommon problems faced by you, the Joomla! site owner, sidestepping all the theoretical fuss.Joomla! is the insanely popular, award winning content management system which helps you build professional looking websites, even if you don't have any HTML programming experience or design skills.Although, sometimes you might trip over some common pitfalls which would slow the progress of your website down. This book will help you find a direct and quick way through these common problems which can be easily avoided with a few tips and tricks. It starts of with solutions the most common queries that you might face during the installation and setup for Joomla! 1.5 moving on swiftly to guide you through Joomla! templates, modules, security, managing your users and much more. So the next time when things go wrong with your Joomla! site and you are wondering, for example, how to work with your site's database; just pick up this book and quickly find your way through this.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Setting up your database on a cPanel® host


This recipe will guide you through the steps necessary to set up a database on your cPanel® enabled host. cPanel® is by far one of the most popular control panels for web hosting, and as you get to know it you will see why. It is a very powerful and well-built application. We'll refer to it several times through various recipes.

We are using a http://www.rochenhost.com/ server for our screenshots.

Setting up your database is simple and easy.

Getting ready

To get started you were provided login details by your host for your cPanel® or 'hosting control' - most likely they will have their own name for it. However if you login and see something like the following generic cPanel screenshot - you are in the right place:

cPanel® is trademark by cPanel, Inc.

If you are in doubt, ask your hosting technical support.

Gather your host login information:

Login URL for cPanel®: ________________________________

Username for cPanel®: _______________________________

Password for cPanel®: ________________________________

Tip

If you cannot keep this book in a safe place, do not write usernames and passwords in it. These should be kept in a safe place.

Each database needs to have a unique name. You will need to provide a name for the database, the user name (for Joomla! itself), and a password. These should be different to your other username and passwords. It is recommended that you allow cPanel® to generate the password for you. This will ensure you have a very strong password.

How to do it...

  1. Login to your cPanel®

  2. Scroll down your screen till you see DATABASES

  3. Click the icon MySQL® Database Wizard - it should look this:

  4. After you click this you will see the following screenshot - this is where you will start the database creation. In this example we have a "prefix" of watcher_ you will have a different prefix.

  5. Fill in your database name which can be anything you want. It has a limitation of 16 characters. Try to choose something descriptive but not common. Write the database name here:

    Database name _________________________

  6. Click the Next Step button

    You should see something like:

    This indicates our database watcher_cookbook was added successfully.

  7. Create a user for Joomla! in our database

    This step is necessary for Joomla! to talk to the database.

  8. Create a username no longer than seven characters.

    Record the username here _______________________

    Now - for maximum security use the password generator. It will create a strong password for you. Here is an example of it in action.

  9. Once it generates a password for you, click the I have copied this password in a safe place checkbox to use it.

    Record the password here for later use: ________________________

    Once you complete this step you should see this screen with your username inserted:

  10. This completes the creation of the user. In our case we chose jadmin1 and our password of U&{u$.S1F2t_.

  11. Give the newly created user rights to use the database.

    The next screen you will see is the Privileges screen.

    The Privileges screen defines the rights this user will have to the database.

  12. Check the ALL PRIVILEGES box.

    Now you will see that all the boxes are checked as follows. If they are not checked, Joomla! will fail to install properly.

  13. Click the Next Step button. You will be presented with a screen similar to the following:

    This completes the setup of your database. Now click Home in the upper left of the screen.

There's more...

We need to be sure the database is working. We do that by returning to the main cPanel® page and scrolling back down to the Database Section. Look for this icon and click it:

Once you click that icon it will launch the administration tool for MySQL. You will see a screen like the one following this paragraph. Please note your information will be different, and the count in your database will be ZERO (0). This partial screenshot shows we have two databases in our example setup. You will only have one.

Note the circled text in the preceding screenshot. The portion following the word MySQL will be your database server name.

Tip

Your server name may differ but will likely be localhost

Record the information you see located in your version of cPANEL®.

Database Server Name: ______________________

Tip

Database Server Name Tip

Most of the time, you can simply use localhost as your Database Server Name unless you see something else indicated in the green circled area.

This completes the set up of your database on cPanel®. You may skip over the GoDaddy.Com® instructions and continue with installing Joomla!

How it works...

This GUI that is embedded into the cPanel interface issues the necessary MySql commands to instruct the database server on setting up a database, adding a user, and giving that user proper permission to use the database.