Joomla - To Get Started

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Yesterday while surfing the web for easy ways to create websites and blogs I came upon Joomla. The name itself sounded weird that I had to check it out and I’m glad I did because I got what I was looking for. An easy and reliable way to create websites!
First, we’ll see what Joomla is. According to the description given in their website:

“Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications.”

It’s a web application that allows you to build a website in a very easy way. Even a common man with little sense of web coding can build websites and blogs using Joomla. It’s the front-end way of creating websites. Some softwares like Adobe Dreamweaver make this possible by applying the famous WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) principle where you can actually make a website by dragging and dropping elements on the webpage and directly viewing the results with minimal coding. This helps to most of the non-web programmers who, like me, want fast and readymade results or at least something that’s pretty easy to make. Joomla does this for you without the  requirement of heavy softwares like Dreamweaver. I do love Dreamweaver but it’s little more technical and you do need to know how the software works in order to know how actually it works and how to debug if something goes wrong. I’m not saying that you don’t have to do this in Joomla, but with the availability of various extensions, ready-to-use templates and its ease-of-use make it much simpler. It’s an open source, easy to use application and it’s free!

To know more about Joomla and what all you can do with it you can visit their page: http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html

That’s a great page to know everything about Joomla. For installing Joomla I would prefer installing on Xampp. I installed on Xampp and it’s a pretty easy procedure. Xampp is a free and open source cross-platform web server solution stack package, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming language. That’s the Wikipedia definition of it. Xampp creates a local server on your computer in which you can store the websites you create and view it locally on your browser. It also installs MySQL database for creating and storing databases required for your site. It’s a complete web-package that gets you ready with a local server and with Joomla installed on it you are ready to create your own websites or blogs.
To Install Joomla on Xampp I found this (below first link) article very helpful. It had a detailed description with pictures to guide you on how to install. If you want to install Joomla 3.0 on Xampp you can view their own website for guidance. Both the links can be found below.

http://www.insquaremedia.com/joomla-guides/building-a-joomla-site/19-how-to-install-joomla-on-xampp
http://www.insquaremedia.com/joomla-guides/building-a-joomla-site/19-how-to-install-joomla-on-xampp

Hope you found this article useful. I’ll be posting more as I uncover the various features of Joomla.