Joomla! How-To's: Installation

Update July 15, 2010: I should have posted this a long time ago, but the BEST way to move your Joomla site to a new server is to use Akeeba Backup.

The most popular article on this site covers How to move your Joomla! site to a new server, but it does not cover all of the details for moving your Joomla! 1.5 site to a new server. This how-to discusses the process of moving your Joomla! 1.5 site to a new server. The information contained in this how-to also happens to be an excerpt from my upcoming book, Beginning Joomla!. (Due out in early April)

Chris Davenport, the documentation team leader for Joomla!, just announced the release of the Joomla! Installation Manual. Thank you to Andy Wallace for developing this manual. Great work!

• Read the manual online, or
• download the PDF version.

In How to Lose the Splash Page, I talk about how to move your Joomla! installation between directories on your server. Because the topic was buried in the "Read more..." section of the post, there may be some readers who ignored it or did not read it. If you want to know how to do this, click on over to How to Lose the Splash Page, and scroll down to "Option 1: How to Move Your Installation".

Splash pages (those annoying pages with some sort of fancy graphic or flash intro that say "Click to Enter" or "Skip Intro") are bad. I could spend a whole article trying to convince you of this fact, but I think this article does a better job of it than I could ever do.

One of the most common mistakes made by Joomla! designers is to assume that just because you loaded Joomla! in a directory called "http://www.yourdomain.com/joomla" or "http://www.yourdomain.com/cms" or "http://www.yourdomain.com/home" rather than your root web directory, you are stuck needing to create a splash or intro page in your root directory to point your users to the real site. Nothing could be futher from the truth. As a webmaster, you have a couple of options for pointing users to your content without the need for a splash page. I will try to cover those options in this tutorial.

Update February 7, 2009: I have now written an an article on how to move your Joomla! 1.5 site to a new server.

Things happen. Plans change. Websites outgrow current servers and need new servers. Hosting companies provide poor service, prompting a web master to decide to change servers. Whatever the reason, you might need to move your Joomla! installation from one server to another.

If you've been running a website for a while, you have probably already accumulated quite a bit of content and several 3rd party components and/or modules, and you do not want to start fresh with a new Joomla! installation. This article explains what I did to move HowToJoomla from my test server (howtojoomla.corywebb.com) to the server that it is on now.