Chapter 9 [ 267 ] How to use MAMP In your Mac's Applications folder, you will now nd a directory installed for the MAMP application. Inside the MAMP directory, you will see a number of folders and les. We need to look for a folder called htdocs. It is within this folder that you will place your new directories that contain your website les: It makes things easier by creating a shortcut to your htdocs folder on your desktop (or in this case, the MAC Finder window) to enable easy access to our web repositories. Here is an example of how you would congure a Joomla! website using MAMP: 1. Download Joomla! to your Mac from the Joomla.org website. 2. Unzip this download, and rename the folder to the project name of your choice. In this tutorial, we will call the unzipped folder JMultimedia. 3. Drag the new JMultimedia folder into your MAMP htdocs directory: 4. Make sure MAMP servers are turned on (using the MAMP control panel). This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 268 ] 5. Open up a web browser and type in http://www.localhost:8888. MAMP defaults to using port 8888 on a Mac, so it is important to include this in your URL. It is possible to adjust the MAMP preferences to not use this by going to the Preferences area from the MAMP control panel: If we leave the settings as default, in order to reach our new Joomla! installation, the address that we need to type as our URL will be: http://localhost:8888/ JMultimedia (assuming you called your project JMultimedia also). With any luck, a Joomla! installation page will now show. Before we begin the Joomla! installation, we rst need to go and create a database, which thankfully is easy to do by using the phpMyAdmin tool that comes with MAMP. Creating a local database Open the MAMP control panel, and click on the Open start page option, or enter http://localhost/MAMP/ into your URL bar. From here, we can use phpMyAdmin to create a new database and then run the Joomla! installer. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 9 [ 269 ] On the MAMP start page, a link to the phpMyAdmin tool can be found: Clicking on this will take your browser to the phpMyAdmin tool home page. To create a new MySQL database for your Joomla! installation, simply enter a new database name into the Create new database eld and click on the Create button: You can leave all other settings as default. Once the database has been created, you should now see this listed on the left-hand column showing the database listings. It is now possible to proceed with the Joomla! installation via the Web Browser Installer, entering the details of your database during the installation process. Your database server will be localhost and the default username and password will be root: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 270 ] Running more than one website locally Creating more than one website locally is easy. Simply download or re-extract another copy of Joomla! from your download and then give the extracted directory a different project name, for example, JMultimedia2. Move this folder into the htdocs area of your local web server (in our case MAMP), and your project will then be accessible under the new URL http://localhost:8888/JMultimedia2, and they should show in a list when you navigate to the main localhost directory, for example, http://localhost:8888. Create a new database for your new project, just as you did before, and then you are ready to install Joomla!. You can create as may local sites as you have space for, as long as they are given different names. For those who want to install other server packages, such as WAMP for Windows or XAMPP, the process will be very similar to that of MAMP. Further installation assistance can be found by visiting the supporting documentation for each product. Most of the free web server environments have been congured to run easily and openly on a local computer, providing ease of development. They have not been congured to be used as live web hosting servers, and because of open congurations, they should not be used to host a live website. Remote server development A remote host is one that you access via the Internet. It may be your own server or rented via a web hosting company. There are many different types of web hosting servers, including dedicated, virtual, and shared hosting, and many forms of operating systems running these servers. Whichever option you choose, it is important to check whether Joomla! is able to run in that environment and a checklist of requirements can be found at Joomla.org under the Documentation area. Working on your site on a remote web server is a surprisingly common approach that is used by many people, including those new to Joomla! and the web development industry. Remote web development usually requires FTP access or some sort of web hosting control panel File Manager tool. It can be dangerous to work on the nal site, because of the simple fact that once a le has been overwritten, there is no way of retrieving it easily without a backup copy. Internet connections can make the process very slow and sometimes FTP connections can corrupt les. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 9 [ 271 ] With that said, working on a remote server may offer the ability to closely match a development environment to the live environment and can also offer the ability to easily show clients the progress of a project. If you do not want to work locally for development, I suggest setting up a remote hosting space to mimic your live environment, and password protect this via htaccess. Server-side programs such as cPanel and Plesk all offer the ability to easily password-protect directories or domains, which will keep it private to you and stop search engines from referencing your development work. If you are using either a remote hosting environment or localhost environment to perform the following additions to your site, please get into the habit of taking a backup of your database and les before proceeding with any of the following. The site structure The following assumes you have a working installation of Joomla! on your web server. If you have any issues during an installation, please search the Joomla. org website, http://help.joomla.org, and the forums to search for answers and assistance. Often, it may be a hosting environment issue rather than any Joomla! issue during the installation. For the purpose of this tutorial we will be building on a new installation of Joomla!, without the default content installed. When working on a Joomla! website, I nd it best to keep two tabs open in my browser window: One for the frontend of the Joomla! website, and one for the administration. For this tutorial, I will be working with Joomla! 1.5, the MAMP web server for local development, and the Firefox web browser: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 272 ] Things to consider when configuring from the start During the Joomla! installation process you get the opportunity to enter in some basic site information, such as a website name, e-mail address, and site login username and password, but there are usually a number of other things that are worth conguring when rst logging into your new Joomla! installation. Global Configuration settings The Global Conguration area of your Joomla! site contains some powerful site-wide settings. It is worth looking at these at the start of a project to see if these require adjustments. Site Settings There is one change we need to make within the Site Settings box, and it is a major one: Change the Default WYSIWYG Editor to Editor - No Editor. This will give us more control and limit issues around entering custom code into your site. Metadata Settings If you know what your site is going to be about (and hopefully you do), then it is possible to pre-populate the global Metadata Settings at this stage: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 9 [ 273 ] Global metadata is presented on pages that do not contain their own metadata information and is valuable information for search engine optimization. Populate the Description and Keywords boxes with content that directly relates to your web project. SEO Settings The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) area of the Global Conguration is probably one of those areas that most administrators will look into. Here we can enable search-engine-friendly URLs for our Joomla! website, which can really help with a more user friendly and search-engine-friendly website: Because our Joomla! web content is created dynamically by the database, there are no physical les created for each article. This means that we need to utilize the SEO URL feature to change our URLs from long complicated strings that are not easily recognizable into more recognizable URLs that relate to the content displayed: SEF URLs turned off: http://localhost/JMultimedia/index.php?option=com_content&view= article&id=1&Itemid=2 SEF URLs turned on: http://localhost/JMultimedia/seo-friendly.html • • This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 274 ] You will need to select Yes for all three elds, as shown in the previous screenshot and then click on Apply at the top-right of the Global Conguration page. We need to make one more adjustment to a le within Joomla! for the SEO feature to become active. In order for SEO to work correctly, it needs to use a feature called mod_rewrite, which is installed on a web server. Most apache servers should have this feature installed, but if yours is not, then you will need to active it, or ask your web server support people to look at this. You can easily check if mod_rewrite is active or not by going to the Help|System Info menu link within your Joomla! administration menu. On this page, there will be a link labeled "PHP Information" and on this page use the browser window search bar to search for mod_rewrite. It should show in an area labeled "Loaded Modules". If mod_rewrite is active, then we are clear to proceed, and need to rename a le named htaccess.txt (which is included at the root of your Joomla! install) to .htaccess. That is all that is required for search-engine-friendly URLs to work for Joomla!. Depending on your computer platform, there may be restrictions in renaming les beginning with a dot symbol. You may need to use an FTP program, such as the free and powerful FileZilla client, http://filezilla-project.org/, to rename your htaccess.txt le. Right, back to the Global Conguration screen. There are three menu links at the top of the Global Conguration page. Click on the second one called "System". On the System page, there are a range of options relating to the hosting server, and how Joomla! interacts with this. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 9 [ 275 ] User Settings This box contains User Registration settings. For the purpose of this project, I am going to turn off User Registration, as we have no requirement for users on the site at this stage. User Registration can be activated for the site at any stage: Media Settings We looked at these in earlier chapters and they are important in allowing the Media Manager to work effectively. At this stage, we can leave these as default, but we may need to re-visit them, depending on what media formats we end up using on the site. Debug Settings Debug is used by developers to view additional information about the page that has loaded. It can help show diagnostic information and SQL errors. You can turn this feature on and off as you wish. If you know how to decipher the information, it is very useful for troubleshooting the build of a website. Cache Settings The website cache helps to optimize and improve performance of your site by creating a temporary copy of pages and delivering that information to the user, rather than going back to the database to retrieve it each time: Caching can really come in handy on large production websites, but for development it can sometimes cause headaches with you making changes and not being able to view them. Let's turn caching off for now. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 276 ] Session Settings The Session Settings control how long a user can be logged in and inactive on the site before being logged out automatically. The default is 15 minutes and you can adjust it: Be cautious of setting this too high, but let's change it to 30 minutes, else you will probably nd yourself getting logged out of the administration area if you go off to get a cuppa. Click on the third menu link called Server at the top of the Global Conguration page: Mail Settings The Mail Settings area of the Global Conguration may require your attention, depending if you require specic site Mail Settings: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 . would congure a Joomla! website using MAMP: 1. Download Joomla! to your Mac from the Joomla. org website. 2. Unzip this download, and rename the folder to the project name of your choice. In this. new Joomla! installation, the address that we need to type as our URL will be: http://localhost:8888/ JMultimedia (assuming you called your project JMultimedia also). With any luck, a Joomla! . Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 270 ] Running more than one website locally Creating more than one website locally is easy. Simply download or re-extract another copy of Joomla! from