Joomla (Wiki) setup in 10 minutes!

A friend at work asked for setting up Joomla as a Wiki so that the team can have a centralized place to share stuff. I had never done the Joomla setup (but had heard a lot about it at different conferences) before so was a little bit worried that it might chew up a lot of my time while doing the setup (playing around with configuration files and DB setup) as I was busy with some other critical tasks.

So finally when I got the time, I logged into a fresh Ubuntu VM that was already setup and started with installing the pre-requisite packages first which were:

– Apache2

– PHP5

– MySQL Server (it was 5.1 I guess)

– php-mysql (php connector for MySQL)

– PhpMyAdmin (in order to do MySQL database administration)

Which was all with a simple ‘apt-get’ command.

Next I downloaded the latest stable release of Joomla from http://www.joomla.org/ which was version 1.5.17. Unzipped it into  /var/www/joomla folder  (web folder for apache) and just pointed my browser at:

http://localhost/joomla

….and I was surprised to see a really nice interface for installation which will do the initial setup all automatically for you that includes setting up database tables, configs and admin user.  Installation was a very simple seven step process and then I was told to get rid of the installation folder and start using my site… easyyy!!

Next thing for me was to find a way so that I can setup a Wiki in there, so I logged in as admin user to:

http://localhost/joomla/administrator

…and was presented with a very nice control panel for administrator and found the “Article Manager”. It was really simple to start adding articles for the Wiki in there, I added a few for for the demo in there and I could see them in the Joomla site (Wiki) right away which was  just sweeeeeet! as the whole thing from setup to having a doc in Wiki was all done in just a few minutes!

Then came another requirement as I was told that we need to do attachments with the articles, I did a little bit of research and found a really nice extension for Joomla which is called “Attachments for Joomla” and can be found at –> http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/directory-a-documentation/downloads/3115

Installation for this extension was just pointing the front-end to the downloaded extension through the administrator control panel…. so just with a click we now have this new functionality where users can add attachments as well for Wiki articles.

The dudes who wanted to use it are all happy with the setup and I am just so impressed with the simple and quick install steps that I will be recommending it to people now 🙂

—
Shoaib Mir
shoaibmir[a]gmail.com