Joomla

Joomla is one of the world’s most popular open-source content management systems (CMS), used to build and run websites without writing code. Its core is highly versatile, and functionality can be extended through a large catalogue of extensions (plugins/add-ons) provided by an active community of developers and businesses.

Joomla has strong built-in support for multi-language websites: you can easily link an English version of an article to its Swedish (or any other) version, so visitors can switch languages with a single click. It also offers advanced user and group management, letting you give different users different permissions (view, create, edit, and so on).

This Loopia guide shows how to install Joomla on Loopia hosting using the One Click Installer, how to log in, and how to troubleshoot common installation issues.

Install Joomla with the One Click Installer

Loopia’s One Click Installer sets up Joomla on your domain in about a minute, including the database, without requiring any manual file uploads.

Open Customer Zone

First, log in to your Customer Zone account. You will be presented with a number of basic choices. Select to start a website.

Choose Joomla

From the list of available applications, select Joomla!.

Fill in the installation options

Next you will see the installation form.

Go through the options:

• Name your website — this is just a title for the site and can be changed later from inside Joomla.
• Username and password — your Joomla administrator login. Choose something secure but still memorable. If the password is too short or too simple you will be prompted to choose a stronger one.
• Email address — a contact email for you as the website administrator.
• Install location — choose carefully, as any existing web content in the target location will be overwritten by the installation. By default Existing domain/subdomain is selected, with your alphabetically first domain pre-selected; you can pick a different domain from the list if you have several. Alternatively, select New subdomain to install on a subdomain (an alternative address to www) — useful for a branch office site, blog, shop, or a Joomla test site. If your domain is example.com and you enter test, the site address will be test.example.com. You can also select New folder to install inside an existing site. With domain example.com and folder test, the address will be example.com/test/.
• Advanced — for a live site, we recommend creating a new, unique database, which simplifies administrative tasks such as backup and restore. If you are doing several test installations, you can place them in the same database. The Table prefix is normally fine as it is, but on very long domain or subdomain names you may want to shorten it — keeping it within the box length is a good rule of thumb.

When done, click Install. The installation completes within a minute.

Log in to Joomla

Once installed, your Joomla administration panel is available at example.com/administrator (replace example.com with the domain you installed on). Sign in with the username and password you chose during installation.

Troubleshooting the installation

If you cannot reach your Joomla site immediately after installation, that is normal under certain conditions:

• If your domain is brand new, please wait up to 48 hours for it to start working. This applies to the website, email and all other services on the domain.
• If the name servers for your domain were changed recently, allow up to 48 hours for the change to propagate.
• If your domain uses third-party name servers, you will need to either change to Loopia’s name servers or point the web record to our web server. Please contact us for the details.
• If the site was previously running on a different platform (Joomla requires UNIX), the switch involves a short waiting time — usually a few minutes, up to 24 hours in the worst case.

Keeping Joomla updated

We always aim to offer the latest stable version of Joomla in the One Click Installer. After installation it is very important that you keep your site up to date: the Joomla developers release new versions and security patches regularly. When you are logged in to the Joomla administration panel you will see update notifications — check these regularly and follow the on-screen instructions to update.

Further documentation

To learn more and really get started with Joomla, see the official guides and documentation at docs.joomla.org.