OSTips-Quickly Create Joomla Websites With Your Own Distribution

In this episode I’m going to show you how to build a Joomla distribution so that you can create brand-new websites out on the Internet anytime you need, that are practically ready to go.

So what’s a distribution? Well a distribution in Joomla is nothing more than creating a site, adding all of your favorite extensions to it, entering your licensing code and then using Akeeba Backup to create the site out on the internet.

It’s not hard to do, but it will save you so much time! Let’s go.

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“Hi and welcome to OSTips from OSTraining. I’m Rod Martin.

So I have my base Joomla site here ready to go. Of course it needs some updating, and so here’s the process that I go through. I maintain a Joomla site like this with all of the extensions that I usually use, and I maintain it locally on my own machine using MAMP.

Now if you need instructions on how to install MAMP or WAMP or something like that check out this OST class.

Once I’ve got MAMP set up and a base Joomla site set up, then every once in a while when I need to create a new one I come into it and run all of the updates and that’s really simple to do. I’m just going to do that right now and obviously I shortened that for the length of the video.

So my Joomla installation is up to date, and here are some of the extensions that I tend to use. Now again, I’m not promoting any extensions here at all. These are the ones that I use on most of my websites, and I think that’s the key. You want to get the ones that you use generally on every web site not everything under the sun, and so these are the ones I use pretty much on every web site that I build.

You’ll note admintools is installed, but I haven’t done the quick setup wizard because that’s best done on the site once it launches.

So now that Joomla is up to date, I’m going to update all of my extensions so everything is up-to-date when I take my first backup.

One of the advantages here is I’ve put all of the licensing codes in for all of the extensions that I’ve paid for so I don’t have to do that when I put the site up to an actual server. The only exception to that might be something like RSForms Pro which requires a license per site in order to be updated and as usual there might be a few extensions that you can’t automatically update depending on whether your licensing is up-to-date or whether you’ve got the license code put in.

So again I’d encourage you to get all of these up-to-date before you take your backup.

Now using Akeeba Backup, and the free version is just fine for this process, I can take a quick backup. Of course I shortened that process for the length of the video.

Now I click manage backups, and here’s the backup that I can grab. Since it’s local, I don’t actually need to download that but there it is. It’s now in my downloads folder.

Alright, the next step then is to quickly head over to where you’re building your new site, and I already have a section ready to go on a live server. I’m going to:

• click file manager (I’m putting this in a subdomain of a domain).
• upload that JPA file
• upload kickstart.php

You can get kickstart.php that from akeebabackup.com as well. That’s the file that runs the process of unpacking and installing your new site.

Alright so, I’ve got my JPA file and my kickstart.php file uploaded.

• close that window
• head back over to my control panel in cPanel
• create a new database

This is the only other step that’s required before we actually get our site up and running.

So I’m gonna run through the database wizard.  The next step is to:

• open that URL you should see your JPA and kickstart.php
• click on kickstart.php
• press escape

I’m gonna go through this really quickly because I typically just use the defaults click start. It’s going to unpack my JPA file or the backup file that I created.

• run the installer

It’s gonna run a check of all of the PHP on my site. You should see all green here. if you don’t, you’ll need to contact your host to fix that.

• click Next

You’ll enter the database information that you set up in the previous step.

• click Next. And it’s going to restore your database. My database is restored.
• click next step

I don’t have to fill any of this in, I can update that here, or I can just do that under global configuration once the site launches.

If you want to update any of the super user settings, you can do that here and typically the defaults here are fine.

• click Next

It’s done.

• click cleanup
• go to my sites back-end where I can now log in, and my website is up and running on my new domain with all of the extensions I would normally have that would take a lot of time to install and configure.

All right so that’s a Joomla distribution using Akeeba Backup it is gonna save you an incredible amount of time as you create new Joomla web sites out on the Internet. \Thanks for watching today.”

Watch our course on Moving Joomla Websites.

Watch our Akeeba Backup Course.