Creating a Website

When we picked up the topic “Creating a Website”, we had imagined sitting hours in front of the computer screen, writing HTML codes. Little did we know about the various open source softwares available for making that task seem simpler and fun.

Joomla is one such open and free Content Management System, and the software is available for download at www.joomla.org. It is a great platform for people to create their websites on. The version available can be used for both Windows and Linux.
The 'Joomla Docs' were of great help especially for people like us, who were using it for the first time.

Choosing a topic was the first dilemma we faced. With college being the new chapter in our lives, we decided to go with “IIIT-Delhi , Through the Eyes of a Fresher”.

Since we were required to create a website that could be accessed over LAN, we had to first set up a server and a database to store the associated files.
There are plenty ways of doing this, but we chose Xampp for the same. Xampp is developed by Apache Friends and is also a free software. It is a combination of Apache, the server and MySQL, the database.

Installation of Xampp :

In Windows :
After downloading the .exe file for Xampp, which is available at http://www.apachefriends.org, installation is a basic 3 step process. After installation, the Xampp Control Panel was run and MySQL and Apache services were started from there.

In Ubuntu :

From the above mentioned site, a tar.gz package was downloaded which was then extracted in the /opt directory. From the terminal a simple command ' /opt/lampp/lampp start ' was used to start the Xampp server.

The functioning of Xampp was checked at http://localhost.The status and settings could be viewed here, after which the server was ready to be used.

Setting Up Joomla :

The setup file for Joomla1.7 was downloaded from www.joomla.org for Windows, a folder C:/xampp/htdocs/Joomla17 was created and the files were extracted there.

In case of Ubuntu, the file was extracted at /opt/lampp/htdocs/joomla17.
This folder was to contain all the content of the website.
Installation of Joomla was done by accessing http://localhost/joomla17 from our machine and the process was completed by following the steps there (for both Ubuntu and Windows users). A few screen-shots have been shown

After the successful installation of Joomla, came the task of adding content to it.

Adding and editing of the content on the website was done by signing in as its administrator by going to http://localhost/joomla17/administrator.

The first thing to do was to create categories. Categories help in viewing related content together. Then, text was added to the website in the form of articles using the Article Manager.

Similarly, a menu was created using the Menu Manager. Articles were added to the menu by selecting the Menu item type as Single articles, and then selecting a previously created article.

Finally, the menu created was published on the website by going to the Module Manager. By clicking New, and selecting the type of module to be created as Menu. Various options such as the Position of the menu on the website were found here. Different types of modules such as random images,footer,banners were published the same way.

The same website can be accessed by other computers over the LAN by http:///.
In our case, if the site needs to be accessed via LAN , the address comes out to be :

http://192.168.*.*/joomla17

It required proper understanding of each component and feature to build the website properly. It took us a long time to figure out how data ended up where, which was the toughest part to figure out in the entire project ! Finally our website was ready and here are a few screen-shots as viewed from another machine via LAN.

Finally, the experience was great, and involved a lot of fun and learning, which would be of great use in the future.

Contributed By :
Jayasi Mehar
Maneet Singh