Documentation

All new templates which are made by our club usually feature a Joomla 3 QuickStart, which is, basically, a complete copy of NorrTheme demo site with all of its extensions and demo content, except some images, which are replaced with placeholders dew to licensing conflicts. In this tutorial you will learn how to install and begin using such a package.

Step 1. Downloading a package

When you found a package you’d like to use as a basement for your website, proceed to download area. Choose the template you want, and then click on Download button at the front-end of Joomla 3 Demo Package.

Step 2. Uploading a package to server

There are two ways of uploading a package to a server: via cPanel or via FTP, with first one being more preferable since uploading extracted files via FTP client can potentially cause permission issues. Unfortunately, not all servers have cPanel installed, so we include both installation ways to this tutorial.

Uploading via cPanel is the fastest and safest way of uploading a QuickStart package. Just remember, that after uploading itself is finished, you should unpack it by pressing respective cPanel button.

Uploading via FTP-client

If your hosting provider does not have a cPanel or any other file manager with ZIP extractor installed, you will have to switch to the FTP client. Unpack a QuickStart package to your local hard drive and upload its contents to your server via FTP. If you are experiencing any issues with files and folders permissions, you should contact your provider.

Step 3. Installation procedure

To begin an installation procedure, you have to access installation web page with your web browser. It is located in the folder where you unpacked QuickStart. You link will look like this: http://www.mysite.com/index.php

This will initiate the installation and you will see Joomla install screen in your browser window. Now this tutorial will guide you through all steps of Joomla QuickStart installation process one by one. On the first step of the installation process, you need to add the necessary information about your site and your administrative username. Click Next.

Very important part, since Joomla is a MySQL-based CMS. On this page you will see everything that relates to where Joomla is going to keep all information. So, it will ask you to create a database for her, a user for this database and a password for a user. Usually, these options are located in cPanel or any other alternative your provider might use. If you don’t know how to do this – ask you hosting support.

After you did this and put database name, user and password into appropriate fields, click Next. There’s absolutely no need to change database prefix – Joomla generates it randomly since version 1.7 to prevent installation of two copies of Joomla into the same database.

This screen holds two important fields. Fist one is NorrTheme Sample Data which must be put to Yes in order for you to install QuickStart package and not blank Joomla. Second one is username that is highly recommended to be changed into something that is not admin. Click Next and complete the installation procedure.

Step 4. Finalization

After receiving the message that you have successfully installed QuickStart, click on Remove installation folder, or you have to quit your website and once again open cPanel or FTP client in order to access internal folder structure of your website. You will need to remove a folder called install in order to begin using your website.

Once you are done, go to the front page of your website and see exactly the same thing, you saw on demo site, down to demo articles. Now you can edit, change and customize it in order to achieve performance and appearance you wish.

Congratulations – you are done here, and QuickStart is successfully installed!