WAMP stack and Joomla on Windows 7

The public web site for our new DR THERAPAT EU-funded project should be backed by a CMS - I thought Joomla might be nice. For testing, I installed a WAMP stack based on Win 7 machine at work. I already had MySql, otherwise I would have used XAMPP or something similar. I pretty much folllowed this blog entry, except for the bit about "Extract php5apache2_4.dll-php-5.4-win32.zip and copy php5apache2_4.dll into the ext/" directory, since I found the dll already present. I also put the packages somewhere else, which necessitated changing the conf files, but nothing unexpected was needed. I also installed phpMyAdmin and used its setup to configure it to use mysqli for DB access.

The Joomla doc lists dependencies on Apache modules mod_mysql, mod_xml and mod_zlib. This is plain wrong. What is meant is the php_ modules!! Now, since I have PHP 5.4.10, all this is very simple since mysqlnd, the native mysql driver, is already compiled into php. I just needed to configure php.ini correctly

extension_dir = ".\ext"

and


extension=php_mysql.dll
extension=php_mysqli.dll

Going to http://localhost:8000/phpMyAdmin now correctly shows the phpMyAdmin login page. 

Then installing Joomla is matter of extracting its downloaded zip into a joomla subdir to Apache's htdocs. This for testing only, I assume for a real web site I'll have to put it somewhere else.

Then going to localhost:8000/joomla, I just needed to go through Joomla' configuration pages, nothing unexpected here. Of course, I had set up a new schema in MySQL beforehand. And voila, my Joomla site showed up with standard content!

Now I need to learn how to program it, but it can't be much different from Drual which I used for my wife's web site at releaseintopeace.net.

'via Blog this'