Just completed my latest website project, a caravan booking website for a colleague. Although it looks simple there is a lot of back-end logic to control caravan bookings and financial reporting. A good example of a site with quite a lot of functionality that can be developed quickly and inexpensively in Joomla.
To visit the site visit – www.caravanspinewoods.co.uk.
I recently came across a problem with Joomla and MySQL databases when I was working on a clients website. I generally use a test server to develop Joomla websites, and then upload the final website to my web hosting provider. However, for reasons now forgotten I decided to develop this clients website as a subdomain under my main business website.
I almost always use JoomlaPack (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security/backup/1606) to backup and restore Joomla websites. If you dont know this utility, go and check it out as it really is a time saver. I used Joomlapack to backup the Joomla site from my business website subdomain and restored it the newly created clients hosting account.
I then noticed that although the Joomlapack restore had worked the database had not copied for some reason and it was referencing the original location. As both of these locations use the same hosting provider, it worked, but obviously was not ideal as my clients website was now tied to my account.
I made a copy of the MySQL database and moved it across to the clients new hosting account, and changing the username and database name within Joomla administration backend. This did not work and I got the following error:
Database Error: Unable to connect to the database:Could not connect to MySQL
As the MySQL user password is different from the original MySQL user password then it can’t log in. Unfortunately Joomla only asks you for the database details including the password when you install Joomla. It is not available (unless i’ve missed it) within the Joomla administration back end. I could have reinstalled Joomla. but at this point I had my heels dug in.
Anyway – For anyone who has any issues like this then here is how I resolved it.
1. I used phpMyAdmin to make a export a copy of the clients Joomla MySQL database.
2. I imported the clients MySQL database in to their hosting account, again using phpMyAdmin.
3 I created a new MySQL database user and associated it with the clients MySQL database (make sure you set the correct user priveleges).
4. I edited the Joomla configuration.php file and changed the following entries to enable Joomla to point to the new database:
I was surprised that $password is stored unencrypted.
Although I have been involved in IT for more years than I care to mention, one area, until recently left me cold, namely website design.
Having spent sometime a few years ago learning HTML I just felt that it was too ungainly a way to design a website. Options such as investing in Dreamweaver had too much investment, both in terms of time and cost.
A few years on and the market has changed completely, products such as Joomla (www.joomla.org) have brought website creation and design within reach of many.
For me, the biggest benefit of Joomla is the separation of design and content. The “look and feel” of the website is defined by a template, of which there are many available. www.yootheme.com and www.rockettheme.com are two I have used. The content is held in a database (MySQL) and is accessed via an administration back-end.
The system is very modular and third-party add-ons are abundant. Community support for the product is excellent with a very active forum.
Once your site is up and running, you can hand it to your content creators and let them run wild, creating content as easily as writing a Word document. This is a great way to hand power to the people that require it. I am a great believer that content is king, and this enables non-technical users to keep website content bang up to date.
As far as administration of the back-end system goes, true, you still have to learn the ins and outs of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) if you want to host your own solution, but there are many great hosting packages available that will install all the required back-end software you need to get Joomla up and running.
