Joomla! is one of the most popular, widely used, and award-winning Content Management System. It allows users to build complex websites with ease. And it is available for free to all users.

I have included this as part of learning activities of my students, and since then, I’ve received positive feedback.

Several issues were discovered while installing Joomla!

1. Pre-Installation Check. If installing the CMS for the first time, I recommend that you “Load Sample Data” to get the feel of how Joomla! works. configuration.php writable is tagged as “no” which indicates it doesn’t meet minimum requirements. Leave the “no” indicator. However, if you do not intead to “Install default sample data”, then you must copy configuration.php-dist (located in Joomla! root directory) to configuration.php In addition you may also consider changing the ownership of the files an directories to www-data; i.e. chown www-data:www-data <directory name>.  This way you will not encounter any problem installing Joomla.
2. Main Configuration. Click “Install Default Sample Data” to view sample pages created using Joomla
3. DB function failed with error number 1046. jtablesession::Store failed. DB function failed with error number 1046 No database selected. If the configuration.php writable is tagged as “no”, this means that the configuration.php is not created. Joomla searches for this file. To remedy this error, do the following steps:
   1. In the Joomla! root directory, copy configuration.php-dist to configuration.php
   2. edit configuration.php, search for the following variables.
      1. set $user to a valid MySQL user
      2. set $password to the password of the MySQL user
      3. set $db to the name of your MySQL database

The screenshots below summarize the installation steps on an Ubuntu Server, VirtualBox, and Mozilla Firefox.

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