December 24th, 2009
What do I need from a client in order to install Joomla and update their preexisting site?
Programming & Design, by kinneret.
the_sio_monster asked:
When installing Joomla on my computer in order to update a preexisting site, do I need my client to give me the Host Name, MySQL User Name, MySQL Password, MySQL Database NAme and MySQL Table Prefix? I already have their FTP information, and the Joomla admin control panel login information.
The easiest way would be just to edit the files directly off of the server. Komodo Edit (my editor of choice) allows editing of files over an FTP connection, so you can try that.
If you don’t want to be messing around with a live server, then you’ll want a full build environment locally. I would set up both Joomla and MySQL on your computer, then push those to the server when things work. For that, you’d need the FTP username and password for all the Joomla files, and the MySQL username and password to import the SQL files.
Yes, you need all of those plus the versions of PHP and MySQL that they are running and whether the site will be running on Apache or under cgi.
If you install on MySQL5.x and they use MtySQL4.x, for example, you will have real problems when you transfer the database to their server. You need to use versions as close as possible to the versions the client uses.
Apart from that, they will need to provide you with the content of the Joomla database. Upgrades often involve database updates as well as file overwrites.