Setting Up Joomla to Play

Joomla looks like being the tool we will be using to manage our Web Site Content for the campus. I downloaded a copy a few months ago to play with, having read an article in a magazine, but haven't done much with it other than exploring online live demos until this morning. Watching Video demos it seemed pretty straightforward, but as with many best laid plans this morning my inexperience would come back to haunt me.

Step 1, download xampp from Apache Friends
Step 2, download The Most Recent version of Joomla
Step 3, Set up a localhost Server on old laptop, by installing xampp
Step 4, unzip and copy Joomla Files to new folder called Joomla in xampp/htdocs
Step 5. open localhost/joomla and install
Step 6. delete temporary installation files
Step 7 run localhost/joomla and login

Sounds pretty straight forward huh! Well it was initially everything going swimmingly until Internet Explorer didn't recognise http:// localhost / I eventually resorted to the xampp read me file where I found an alternative way to get to the host using an ip address, that when pasted into IEs address bar accessed the splash page I was looking for. Using this I was able to install Joomla and Run it, log in and am now feeling really pleased with my self as I now have a space where I can practice the skills and processes I need to learn to begin thinking about transferring content from our existing website to form the Primary Pages in the Bridge Web Site.