Book Image

Joomla! 1.5: Beginner's Guide

By : Eric Tiggeler
Book Image

Joomla! 1.5: Beginner's Guide

By: Eric Tiggeler

Overview of this book

Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. Although it's a fun and feature-rich tool, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that meets your needs perfectly. Using this book you can create dynamic, interactive web sites that perfectly fit your needs.This practical guide gives you a head start in using Joomla! 1.5, helping you to create professional and good-looking web sites, whether you want to create a full-featured company or club web site or build a personal blog site.The Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide helps beginners to get started quickly and to get beyond the basics to take full advantage of Joomla!'s powerful features. Real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, contemporary, feature-rich web sites any developer can achieve with Joomla!. It gives you a head start and explains what's good and useful about Joomla! features and what's not. The focus is on clear instructions and easy-to-understand tutorials, with minimum of jargon. This book provides clear definitions, thoroughly covering the concepts behind the software and creating a coherent picture of how the software works. This book is not about what Joomla! can do—it's about what you can do using Joomla!.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites

Tip 6: Have a backup ready


Whatever precautions you take, be prepared for catastrophes. Always have a backup ready to restore your site to its most current healthy state.

There are a few great Joomla! extensions that automate the backup process. A very popular one is JoomlaPack. It will backup all necessary files (all Joomla! files and the database contents) to recover your site. JoomlaPack will allow you to restore the backup file to any location (not just to its original location).

Creating a Backup with JoomlaPack

This is how you install JoomlaPack and create a backup:

  1. 1. Go to http://joomlapack.net to download the JoomlaPack extension file.

  2. 2. Navigate to Extensions | Install/Uninstall to install the extension.

  3. 3. Navigate to Components | Joomlapack and click on Backup Now to make a backup using the default settings. The backup should start immediately:

  4. 4. When the backup is complete, you'll see the following message:

  5. 5. To save the backup file on your computer, click on Administer Backup Files. Select the backup file and click on the Download button.

Restoring a backup

This is how you restore a backup file:

  1. 1. Unzip the JoomlaPack backup file that you downloaded to your computer earlier.

  2. 2. Using an FTP program, upload all of the files from the backup ZIP file to the original location: the web server directory where you installed Joomla!.

  3. 3. When all files have finished uploading, point your browser to the URL of your site adding /installation/index.php. For example: www.yoursite.com/installation/index.php.

  4. 4. The JoomlaPack installer screen will appear. Follow the instructions of the installer.

There's a step-by-step tutorial on using JoomlaPack for backing up and restoring Joomla! sites at http://joomlapack.net/help-and-support/documentation/joomlapack-user-guide.html.

Note

Before you upgrade Joomla! to an updated version, it's a good idea to create a backup of your current site. If anything goes wrong, you can quickly have it up and running again.