PACKT 2010 Open Source Awards

Here is your chance to nominate your favorite open source project for PACKT 2010 Open Source Awards. The categories include content management systems among others. So help your favorite projects with funding and recognition, without spending a dime from your pocket!

Joomla! 1.5 Doesn’t List Core Modules

UPDATE: See the comments on this post that may make this post irrelevant 🙂

A minimal Joomla! 1.5 install without any sample data seems to not show core modules such as mod_syndicate. It turns out that this is so by design. This excellent post shows how to enable these extensions.

Essentially, the module XML file does not list all the files that are part of the module. These need to be added to the XML file and then the module files can be zipped up and installed through the administrator. You do need to remove the corresponding folder from the server before attempting to install it.

Moved a Joomla site to another server

I had a staging version of my Joomla 1.0.12 site at home on Linux (Fedora Core 6). Once I was ready to go live to the hosted version, I needed to move the complete site to the live servers and I didn’t want to re-enter all the content.

I found this excellent reference – seems deceptively simple, but it is indeed that simple.

I followed these steps:

Staging

1. Copied the web directory for the staging site to another location.
2. Edited the configuration.php in the copy for the following parameters: $mosConfig_user, $mosConfig_password, $mosConfig_db, $mosConfig_absolute_path, $mosConfig_live_site, $mosConfig_cachepath
   
3. Zipped up the copy files
4. Exported mySQL database for the staging site using phpmyadmin.
   

Live

1. Created a database with the parameters specified in step 2 for Staging.
2. Used phpmyadmin to import the mySQL database contents.
3. Uploaded the zipped files to the site and unzipped them.
   

At this point, the live site was up and running.

PS: It would be naive to assume that everything worked the first time. For example, I had to install phpmyadmin in my staging area and there were issues with new user creation in mySQL. I also performed a site move to another area on the same server to figure out the problems I might encounter when moving to the live servers. Once the annoyances were out of the way, it was a pretty smooth move.