Uploading Joomla to your web server

After having developend and tested your website on a local server, the next big challenge is uploading the website to your web server, and updating the configuration such that you “go live”. The tutorial below gives you the steps required to move your Joomla website from your local computer to a server. With a few tweaks these steps also apply to moving Joomla from one host to another.

Upload all files to your web server

The first thing you need to do is transfer the files to the web server where your live site will be hosted. To be able to do this, you will need FTP (FTP is a way of allowing easy transfer of files across the web) access to your web server. FTP access typically consists of:

• FTP Address – typically this is something similar to ftp.yourdomain.com
• FTP Login details – username / password to access the ftp area

This information is given to you when you apply for a hosting account with any hosting company. To access the FTP area you will need an FTP client. A free and easy to use ftp client is FileZilla. Download and install this client and then enter the information to your ftp area. These should be similar to the image below:

Once you have connected to your webserver, upload all the files to the host. This is done by selecting all the Joomla files from your local hard drive and dragging them to the window which is connected to the host. This will start transfer of all your Joomla files to your hard disk.

Note: if you host has already installed Joomla for you, do not overwrite the configuration.php files. This contains very important details regarding the your Joomla host. You should keep a backup copy of this file. All other files can be overwritten, such that you have all the configuration you have done on the local installation.

Export / Import the Joomla database

Warning: the following steps about exporting / importing the joomla database are significantly technical. Please be aware of what you are doing because you may create a real mess.

The next step to tranfer the site you have created locally to the web server is the transfer of the Joomla database from your local MySQL, to the webserver database. This consists of two steps

• Exporting your current local database
• Importing the exported database to the MySQL database on the hosting company’s server

Export the local Joomla database

To export your current database you need to use the phpMyAdmin located on your local server and export the database. The phpMyAdmin URL differs depending on the local development server you are using. If you are using XAMPP to test and develop you website, you will find phpMyAdmin at http://localhost/phpMyAdmin

Choose the database which contains the website you want to upload, and export it to a file. This step depends very much on the phpMyAdmin you are using. However, there should be an Export link. Export all the tables. Once the database has been export to a .sql file, you should open the file with a text editor, and check that the file looks ok. It should contain the Joomla tables. Make sure there isn’t a Create database line. The database should be created manually.

Import to the hosting MySQL database

Once you have exported the database, you need to import on the host. Your hosting company should be able to provide you with access to MySQL. If you still haven’t created a database you should create it now. Take note of all details, especially the address of the server where the MySQL resides, the name of the database, username and password to access the database. If the Joomla database has already been created previously (using the Joomla installation procedure or otherwise) you should use the details given to you when creating the database.

Log on to the phpMyAdmin interface, find the import tab, and import the file you have exported above. Once again, the location of the Import link varies depending on the phpMyAdmin version being used, however this should be fairly intuitive.

Configure

Up to now, if you try to access your website, you will probably be given an error. This is because the configuration.php file you had on your local server does not contain the information related to your hosting account details. As stated previously, if your host has already installed Joomla for you, you should leave the configuration.php file created unchanged. Otherwise you will need to change the following critical details:

Joomla 1.5

• var $host = ‘localhost’; – this is the address of the server which is hosting your MySQL database
• var $user = ‘sqluser’; – this is the name of the username which will be used to access the Joomla MySQL database
• var $password = ‘p@ssw0rd’; – password for MySQL database
• var $db = ‘j15stable’; – MySQL Joomla database name
• var $log_path = ‘\home\logs’; – the path where any log files will be stored
• var $tmp_path = ‘\home\tmp’; – the path for tmp files

Joomla 1.0

• $mosConfig_host = ‘mysql.youhost.com’ – this is the address of the server which is hosting your MySQL database
• $mosConfig_user = ‘joomla_joomla’ – this is the name of the username which will be used to access the Joomla MySQL database
• $mosConfig_password = ‘password’ – password for MySQL database
• $mosConfig_db = ‘joomla_joomla’ – MySQL Joomla database name
• $mosConfig_absolute_path = ‘/home/xxxdomain/public_html/’ – this the absolute path to your Joomla installation. This differs from host to host so you will probably need to contact your host to ask for this. This used because there are a number of core files / components files which use other files. These files are imported or referenced using the exact path to the file. If this setting is not correct, you will get a File Does not exist error.
• $mosConfig_live_site = ‘http://www.your-domain.com‘ – this is used so that Joomla can create links links. If you want your site and links to have a www, then put http://www.your-domain.com, if you don’t want a www, the put http://your-domain.com. These settings need to be supported by your host.
• $mosConfig_cachepath = ‘/home/xxxdomain/public_html/cache’ – this is absolute path to the cache directory. The cache is used to increase the performance of your website. As you can see this is the same as the absolute path plus /cache (since this is the default directory where the cache files are stored.

Once all these entries in the configuration.php file have been given the correct values, Joomla should be able to access the database and code, and thus if you go to t
he address of your page, you should have a working Joomla website with all the customisation you have done. If not, one of the above settings is probably incorrect, or you might need to configure some settings further.

Test and secure the website

Go through all the website, to make sure that everything has been setup correctly. Since you should have uploaded the website, most of your settings should be correct. However, you might still have some minor configurations to do, so go through each page and area to test the everything is working correctly.

You should also take all the steps to secure your Joomla website.

The Easy Way Out

As you can see, the steps are fairly complicated and require quite some knowledge of various technologies. This is not something which should be attempted by someone who does not have experience or who does not understand what is going on. If you think these instructions are too difficult to follow, use a third party component which will do all the dirty work for you. A recommended tool for this is the JoomlaCloner component. This allows you to move your Joomla installation easily.

• Official WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Plugin Database

There are hundreds of WordPress plugins available in the Internet, but you may not require all of them for your site. I selected 14 essential plugins which I am currently using.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.

All in One SEO pack

Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

Some features of this plugin are:

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For WordPress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• You can fine-tune everything
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

DMS GuestBook

DMSGuestbook is an easy configurable guestbook with a lot of features. You can customize the whole DMSGuestbook to your desire

The plugin features are:

• Simple work on the attitudes over front-end (e.g. text color, guestbook width, border color…)
• Extended attitude possibility over the css file
• Preset DMSGuestbook caption text in german, english and swissgerman
• Make your own language template in few minutes
• Set mandatory fields where user must be filled out
• Set text hidden in the DMSGuestbook (e.g. ip address)
• Captcha antispam (image, mathematically)
• Manage the DMSGuestbook user entries. (e.g. name, message, url, ip adress)
• Sidebar widget
• Administrator can review posts before shown this
• Create your own guestbook template (beta)
• Administrator can search entries in guestbook (beta)

Embed It

Embedit is one of the most useful plugins made for WordPress which allows publishers to put all pieces of embeddable code, (widget, javascript, adsense) inside their blog post, by allowing to overcome any number of obstacles about this problem. It been developed by Matteo Lonescu. This truly simple plugin resolves what for many has been a frustrating problem for any type of “embeddable” objects to add to any post. Instead, EmbedIt allows you to embed any html code in a post, by deciding precisely where you want to put it, allowing you freedom of coding your html without being annoyed by the wysiwyg editor.

Key Features are:

• embed Youtube videos into wordpress
• embed ustream into wordpress
• embed a custom Google Map into wordpress
• embed whatever html code into wordpress
• embed specific Adsense code into wordpress posts deciding WHERE it should go inside an article

FeedSmith

FeedBurner have taken over the development of the Feedsmith WordPress plugin that removes the worry from WordPress user about visitors requesting their RSS feed. When using WordPress there are a number of ways a user can request your RSS feed by clicking on different links. The Feedsmith plugin handles these requests to ensure the visitor is directed to your Feedburner RSS URL.

Global Translator

Global Translator automatically translates your blog in the following fourteen different languages: English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch and Norwegian. The number of available translations will depend on your blog language and the translation engine you will chose to use.

Main features are:

• Four different translation engines: Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt, FreeTranslations
• Search
  Engine Optimized: it uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URL
• Fast Caching System: a built-in cache is provided in order to reduce the online connections to the translation engines
• Fully configurable layout: you can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar by choosing between a TABLE or DIV layout for the flags bar and by selecting the number of translations to make available to your visitors

Google Analytics

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin. In the options panel for the plugin, you can determine the prefixes to use for the different kinds of outbound links and downloads it tracks.

Show-My-PageRank

If your wordpress blog has a better page rank, here is a better chance to reveal it to your blog readers. That is WordPress Page Rank Plugin Show-My-PageRank. What you want to do is just download this plugin and activate it. All of your wordpress post automatically tagged with your google page rank. This will increase your readers interest. More page ranked articles / post get more readership. Just try. Remember , you DON’T need to enter your page rank manually; This plugin automatically pull up your page rank directly from server each time (Live Results). You can also add your page rank any where in your blog by .

Features:

• Live Page Rank : You need not to specify your page rank. Plugin automatically checks google server each time
• Cute Page Rank Show : Greenish-white combination
• Fast loading : It never affect your normal page loading speed
• Auto Embedding : All of your post automattically get embedded with its page rank (You can also disable this)
• Replaceable : You can place your page rank anywhere as you wish
• Readablity : Your user get more enthusiasm when he/she read your blog post if you have better pager rank for that post

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo!, are notified about the update.

Increase Sociability

The best way to increase your traffic from Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com is to get more votes. Often you may have a great blog post, and people do visit via these websites.

My Page Order

My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.

Share This

The ShareThis WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more. ShareThis makes a WordPress plugin that provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to post your site content to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail & other communication channels (like Facebook and MySpace) to a friend.

Subscribe Me

The Subscribe Me plugin for WordPress adds buttons at the end of your sidebar so your visitors can subscribe to your blog via services such as Bloglines and MyYahoo!.

Yahoo! Shortcuts

Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress plugin intelligently enriches your blog post with great content from Yahoo! Maps, Finance, and beyond. Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin for WordPress available under the BSD license. The images, designs, logos, modules (including the content and services that flow through the plugin) are provided under the terms located here, which you have to agree to activate the plugin.