This is my control panel, the cPanel control panel located here at BlueHost.
cPanel is an open source control panel that many, many Web hosts use, and
BlueHost is a fairly popular Web host.
You can use any one of a number of hosting places for hosting Joomla
Web sites. Lots of people host Joomla
sites here a BlueHost. SiteGround is another one, Rockin', HostGator is very,
very popular, WireTree is popular as well, so these are some places you can go
to host your Joomla Web site.
Here in the control panel, we are going to start by uploading the zipped
file that I generated; all of the Joomla
files that are compressed together, and I am going to upload these to the server.
So I am going to scroll in down to find my Files section of the control panel.
This may be in different places depending on which Web host you are using. I
am going to click on the File Manager icon, and I am going to go ahead and open
this, and I am going to locate the place where my Web hosting is located.
Mine is a little bit different here with BlueHost, because this is a
multi-account configuration. Generally speaking, when you login to the control panel
here, and you go to your file structure for your Web site, you will be looking
for a folder called public html, or www, and usually that's where you're going to put your Web site.
So I am going to scroll on down here, and find my folder. So here I am.
This is where my Web site is going to live, right here, and as you see, I have a
bunch of files that are located here by default.
If you really wanted to, I suppose you can hang on to these, but they're not
really doing anything right now. It's just showing that there's a placeholder
for this Web hosting.
So I am going to delete everything that's here.
You can leave the cgi-bin folder, but delete everything else. Go ahead and hit
the Delete key, and delete those files.
Now I can go ahead and upload my zipped Joomla
file, so I am going to click on my Upload button, and I am going to browse to my
Desktop to find the Joomla
zipped file, and say Open, and this is going to go ahead and start uploading for
me, and that will take just a second. Great!
So my zipped file is now uploaded.
I can close this tab, and if I hit reload, I'll see my zipped file right here
inside of my Web hosting.
If I select that now, and say Extract, this will extract this file right into my
Web hosting directory.
So I am going to go ahead and say Extract files, and this is going to go
ahead and do that for me.
There you go. Now all my files are extracted; I can say Close.
Remember to hit reload, and that will show you that we have Joomla's
file structure here in place.
So we have got our files. The next thing we need to make sure we have in
place is our database, so I am going to leave the File Manager open; don't
close it. Switch on back to your control panel tab, and find the database
portion of your control panel.
We are going to click on the MySQL Database Wizard icon, and we are going to walk
on through the process of this particular Web site.
So here, we are going to enter a name for this database, and then I am going to go
to my next step. That will create an empty database for me. Then I am going
to enter a database Username and Password.
Remember, over on MAMP and WAMP, our database Username and Password were root,
and -- nothing on WAMP, and root, and root on MAM. And that's not necessarily a good thing.
That's very insecure.
It doesn't matter when it's running on a computer that's in front of you, but of
course, when these sites go online, it's very important to make sure you have a
secure Username and Password.
So I am going to go ahead and enter that here, and Generate Password. Then I am
going to go ahead and say Create User.
And so this is confirming that I have created a database, a database username,
and a database password.
My last step, I'm going to assign ALL PRIVILEGES to the database user.
Check this off, and say Next Step, and it will tell me that, Hurray!
You have added a database user to a database.
So everything is good.
Now what I need to do is go to phpMyAdmin, and import the information to the
database that I just created.
So I am going to go back to cPanel, and I am going to scroll down to the database
section here in cPanel, and I am going to go to phpMyAdmin.
Go ahead and click that, and this is going to ask me for a Username and Password.
Some Web hosts do this, and some Web hosts don't. It depends on your Web
host whether you will be asked for username and password or not.
But either way, you will wind up on the screen in phpMyAdmin. Find your Joomla
database over here in the left column, and click on it, and when you click on the
name of that database, what you should see is absolutely nothing.
It should tell you that there are no tables found in the database.
So what we are going to do now is import that information to this database.
Very, very simple. We'll click on the Import tab right here, and we are going to
Browse on our computer for that Joomla.sql file, so find that, and say Open, and
then we are going to go ahead, scroll down to the bottom, and say Go. That
will import all of the database directly here into our new database, and you can
see all of the tables are listed over there on the left column. Okay, great!
So we have all of our files in place, we have our database, it's populated with
information; we are good to go, right?
Well, not quite yet.
When we were in our WAMP and MAMP environment, we had a different database name,
database username, and database password than we do now, and so we need to make
sure that these two entities can talk to each other; Joomla's
files, and Joomla's
database, and that is done through the configuration.php file.
So last thing we have to do is edit that.
We will go ahead and close this tab for phpMyAdmin. Back here in the File
Manager, I told you to keep it open, what we were going to do is we were going
to scroll here, right here in the root of your Web site, right in the public
html, or the www folder.
If you scroll on down and find configuration.php, click on that, and then click
on the Edit button, and say Edit.
The configuration file is really just a long string of variables, and we are just
going to edit some of these variables now; specifically we are going to edit the
user, the password, and the database.
They are right here; these three lines.
MAMP people, you may have a password. WAMP people, you probably don't.
So now we are going to go ahead and edit this, and change it to the information
that you just created. And you did save that information, right?
This is a great time to open up that password manager, and make sure that you
have entered all of the information that you need to run this Web site. Someplace
secure; I like Passpack.
All right, so I am going to Edit this now, and when you're done editing, go ahead
and say Save Changes, and then Close.
Now, if all has gone well, if you've entered the correct database username,
database password, and database name, which sometimes is harder than you might think,
when I open up a new tab here, and I go to the URL for my Web site, which in this
case is joomla.kineteco.inc.com, my Web site should come right up for me, and I
should be able to navigate right on through this Web site.
Everything is all good and available here. Hurray!
There is one change I need to make after the fact, and that is down here on my
Login. If I click on this, I am going to log in to the Web site; I am going to
log in as joe, with my Password of 123456, and I am going to hit the Login button,
and notice what has just happened here.
Do you see the URL at the top of the screen?
I just went from my external Web site at joomla.kineteco.inc.com, and I have been
redirected to localhost.
What just happened?
Well, what happened was when we put together the Login configuration in ACL,
we specified an absolute path back to localhost.
We need to make sure that we fix that right now.
We can see the Web site here,
right here on our screen, but nobody else will be able to.
They will get a 404 error when they try to log in.
So to do this, I am going to hit my Back button, and make sure I am back at
joomla.kineteco.inc.com.
I am going to open up another tab, and I am going to go to, once again,
joomla.kineteco.inc.com/administrator, and I am going to log in with my revised
User Name, and Password, and now I am going to go to Menus > Footer Menu, I am going
to go to my Login, and I am going to change the URL here under Advanced Options
for my Login Redirect
from localhost to joomla.kinetieco.inc.com, and I am going to say Save & Close.
So now when I go to my Home page here, and now when I scroll down to click on
Login, and I log in to the Web site -- it looks like I am actually logged in here, so
let me log out real quick. And I log into the Web site with joe, and my Password
123456, and I hit Login,
now I am in fact redirected to the distributor's page. It is the correct the URL,
and I have my For Distributors page, and I have my Edit your profile link.
I am going to leave joe here as a log in, so if you want to come to
joomla.kineteco.inc.com, you can log in as joe, 123456, and you can see
Joe's account here.
But I am going to turn off the Edit your profile link, so that you can't change
Joe's information, and Joe's Password, which you would be able to do if you
logged into this Web site.
So congratulations! You have just launched your first Joomla web site.
I hope you feel as good as I do.