In this tutorial you are going to need to download first a program called Wamp, which can be downloaded from this site.
Once you have done that, you can now download Joomla from here. It's completely free and open source. In a few minutes we are going to start getting to the somewhat difficult things, so I shall be using photos to illustrate this.
When your Joomla files have been fully downloaded, you need to extract them to your Wamp folder. By default, it will have installed to C:\wamp. If you have installed it correctly, then you should see the following files:
The folder you are going to extract the Joomla files to is the www folder, as shown in the above image. For the purpose of this tutorial, I have created folder called FA Tutorial inside the www folder, and this is where I am going to extract the Joomla files to.
When this is finished, you need to make sure that the wamp server is running. To do this, you need to search for wamp and click on "Start Wamp Server". Wamp should take a few seconds to be fully ready - the icon will first appear red, then yellow before turning white, as seen in the below image -
When it has turned fully green, you need to click on it, to bring up this:
Then you are going to click on Localhost, which should automatically open up your browser and take you to this screen-
At this point, you will know if you extracted the Joomla files to the correct folder, if you have something similar to FA Tutorial, under "Your Projects", as I do here-
Now, before you do anything with Joomla, you first need to set up the database. To do this, you need to click on phpmyadmin. From this screen you need to click on Databases on the top left corner and then type in the name of the database you want to create, in my case it's going to be FATutorial -
and then click "Create". Voila! You've just created a database.
When this is done, you need to navigate back to the localhost, following the steps above. When you have, you can finally click on FATutorial (or whatever you may have called it) under Your Projects and finally you get taken to the Joomla installer.
The first few screens are relatively easy and unless you want to really pay attention, you can click next until you get to the database screen, as seen here:
This is why you needed to have a database already set up. For this, the username is mostly always going to be root and the database name will be whatever you called it in phpmyadmin, in my case fatutorial. You'll know you have done it correctly when you get taken to the FTTP step. If you already have a domain name and hosting purchased, with FTTP set up, you can put the details here so you can FTTP it to the host. However, since we are running it using wamp on the localhost (i.e. on this computer rather than over the internet), we can just skip this by clicking next.
Here is where you put in the site details. In my case the site name is going to be FATutorial, the email FA@Tutorial.com and the password fatutorial. The Admin username should be left at admin, just because it's going to be easier when you get to accessing the admin area. It is a good idea to also install the sample data, as it will give you an idea as to how the site will look when it's fully up and running.
This is now the final screen and you just need to delete the install directory before proceeding.
