Product Management Insight

A Content Management System is used to handle website content which can include text, images, audio, video etc. A CMS allows you to create a website without having any prior knowledge of programming. For the past couple of weeks I tried my hands on open source content management systems. The 2 premier open source content management systems in the market are Joomla and Drupal. The names sound funny but these 2 tools are one of the most robust tools available which can give any other CMS tools a run for their money. It was a tough couple of weeks to figure out the installation process of setting up the Content Management systems. After going through tons of articles on the Web, I managed to successfully install these on my machine.

Through this article I’ll try to share my experience in setting up the CMS tools in a local environment. Following are a few tools you would need on your machine in order to properly configure these CMS tools:

1) IIS (Internet Information Services/Apache Web Server: You can install IIS on your Windows XP machine by going to Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Windows Components Wizard and select IIS from the list as shown in the figure to install it. IIS is a Web Server which enables you to publish your webpages in a local/global environment. I didn’t use Apache but you can use it instead of IIS.


2) PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor): PHP is a Server Side programming language used to produce dynamic Web Pages. We don’t need PHP to do any sort of programming in this walkthrough but it is pivotal as the CMS tools we are using contain pages created in PHP. PHP can be downloaded at www.php.net. Once you have installed the PHP executable and setup your IIS Server, you can test whether your PHP is working correctly or not. You would need to create a document test.php and enter the following text in it: ?php phpinfo();? included in <> tags. Save the test.php and place it in this folder: C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\test.php which is your IIS Server’s root directory. Once all the above steps are complete, test your PHP installation by going to this URL http://localhost/test.php. If you see the page as shown in the image, it means that PHP is successfully installed on your machine.


3) MySQL Server: MySQL is a free open source database that has all the features that an expensive server can have (For e.g. SQL Server, TeraData costs can go up to thousands of dollars). Joomla and Drupal make use of MySQL as the back-end which provide storage for all text content and configuration settings. You can download MySQL Server from www.mysql.com but don’t forget to download the MySQL administrator (Image below) as well which will provide a front end GUI (Graphical User Interface) for your databases. Configuring and Installing MySQL is very simple and easy but if you do face any problems, you can always search the Web. It is however mandatory to create a username and password which you will have to use in order to install Joomla and Drupal. (Note: One of the biggest problems I faced after the installation of MySQL and PHP was getting MySQL compatible/talk to PHP. Basically there are a lot of extensions or Dlls that you might have to play with or change in order to create a successful connection between MySQL and PHP. I still can’t figure out which exact extension was responsible for making these 2 tools compatible but it is either php_mysql.dll or php_mysqli.dll. So if you are unlucky, then you might have to wait a little longer than expected to make Joomla or Drupal work. However, I finally managed to make these 2 tools talk by installing EasyPHP which is explained next.)


4) EasyPHP: This tool allows quick compatibility of PHP with the Web Servers and databases. It was only after installing this tool was I able to access Joomla and Drupal on localhost. This tool will install all the extensions that PHP needs in order to create a connection with MySQL. You can install EasyPHP from http://www.easyphp.org. Once you have installed and executed EasyPHP, you can see an E icon on the taskbar (bottom right of your screen). Right click on that and go to Configuration -> PHP Extension. Once you see the box as shown in the below image, you should select all the extensions listed in the box as it will install the necessary Dlls.


Once you have completed the above steps, then you need to install Joomla which you can download from www.joomla.org and Drupal from www.drupal.org. Choose the latest installation versions (I chose these files Joomla_1.0.15-Stable-Full_Package.zip and drupal-6.1.tar.gz) and extract these files in the root directory of your Web Server (C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\joomla and C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\drupal). Once you have extracted these files, you would need to create respective databases for these 2 tools in MySQL Administrator as shown in the below image.


Finally you would need to go to http://localhost/joomla/index.php and http://localhost/drupal/index.php in order to install these 2 tools on your machine. While installing these tools, it would be required to create a connection with MySQL Server in order for these CMS tools to publish their files on the database by entering your MySQL credentials as defined earlier. Once your installation is complete, you should see the following pages as shown in the last 2 images.




All in all it was a nice experience learning the CMS installation procedure as it has added a new dimension to my career and also a skill-set. Hopefully you like this article and let me know if you have any questions regarding the rigorous installation process as I’ll try my best to help you.