Testing Joomla on Windows with XAMPP

Continuing to experiment with my XAMPP setup (Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP for Windows XP), I just installed Joomla, a popular open-source content management system.

It only took about 10 minutes to install Joomla 1.0 using these steps:

1. Visit the WordPress download page and download WP in Zip format
2. Extract the files to c:\xampp\htdocs, making sure to use the folder names inside the Zip file (if done correctly, you should have a file c:\xampp\htdocs\joomla\index.php)
3. Open the local phpMyAdmin page and login as root
4. Select Databases and create a database named joomla with encoding utf8_unicode_ci
5. Select Privileges tab and create a user joomla and password of your choice, allowing all privileges for the joomla database
6. Open the local Joomla install page and follow the steps to complete the setup; when prompted for the MySQL database information, use database host localhost, name joomla, user joomla, and password as created above

Joomla’s installer is very nice and automatically detects not only required and optional software packages, but checks your PHP settings for recommended security. After setup is complete, you are prompted to delete the installation folder (for security reasons); in fact, Joomla itself won’t run until it detects the installation folder is gone.