Joomla 1.5 Directory and its Files

What are all the folders and files in the joomla directory?

In this article we are going to talk about the Joomla! Directory structure.

As you can see there are a lot of folders and files.

I’m not going to describe every file here, why?, because there are to many joomla files and it will take to much.

We are going to discus about the main folders and some of the root files you are seeing in the picture above.

Let’s start with the folders.

• administrator

This is the folder for Joomla back-end and it’s like the Joomla root folder.

There is a component folder, a templates folder in witch are the back-end templates, khepri being the default template, a language folder in witch are stored the languages you installed for the back-end.

• cache

Every rendered Joomla page is made by a php and mysql request.

To make the website load faster joomla uses this folder to temporary store (cache) popular pre-rendered pages, so when you request a popular page, Joomla will load the page from cache so that you will have to wait less for that page to load.

• components

In this folder joomla store all its components. All installed components can be found here, as you can see the default ones are also here.

• images

The images folder is where you find all your articles images, more exactly in the stories sub-folder, banners and smilies for articles.

You can change Joomla’s default image folder in the global configuration manager, which I’ll discuss in another article.

• includes

The includes folder contains PHP files that helps joomla with the automate inclusion of content.

• language

Here are stored all the language files for the front-end of your website. Every translation of the website is stored in a sub-folder named in this format: standardLanguageCode_standardCountryCode. As you can see the default language is (en_GB) English_GreatBritan.

• libraries

This folder contains all the core libraries that Joomla uses.

• logs

This folder should be automatically filled by the Joomla! installer. Here’s where all the logs are stored.

• media

Media may be stored in this folder for Joomla to access.

• modules

All the modules you installed and the standard ones that comes with Joomla! are stored here.

Modules are for the front-end of your joomla website and they often provide the front-end display for a component.

• plugins

Here are stored all joomla plug-ins which are framework extensions and they operate at a lower level than components.

A plug-in example is TinyMCE which is Joomla!’s default editor.

• templates

In this folder you will find all the template installed for the Joomla! front-end website.

All the sub-folders found here match the name of a template.

The back-end template can be found in “\administrator\templates”.

• tmp

All the temporary files and cookies used by Joomla! are stored here.

• xmlrpc (eXtensible Markup Language Remote Procedure Call (XML-RPC))

This feature of joomla allows a procedure call which can be sent into the Joomla server for on-server execution.

Files

configuration.php

As the name said this is the Joomla! configuration file.

Here you can find options like the state of the website, the editor you use to write your articles, data access to the database, tmp and log folders path, meta-data and keywords for the first page of your website and many more options.

index.php

This file launches Joomla! installer or it reads configuration.php an starts the website.

htacces.txt

We will rename this file from htaccess.txt into .htaccess(server configuration file) so we can use the  SEF(search engine friendly) Section of Joomla!

robots.txt

This file allow or disallow robots, like googlebot and others, to crawl your website or a part of it and to index it. For more information visit robotstxt.org

Related posts

• Joomla! 1.5 Global Configuration

Xampp configuration to install joomla!

Here we’re going to discussed about some configuration that we have to make for Joomla! to run smoothly.

Before you can install Joomla 1.5, you have to download Joomla’s archive and extract that archive in the public folder of the web server.

In our case these folder is htdocs of our xampp installation.

After we extract Joomla’s setup files will make some adjustments to the php’s configuration in order to ensure full compatibility with Joomla!.

This settings are:

I already made the setting, that is why “Actual” are all green.

Usually you only have to change off “Display Errors”, if you need to change something else, please comment and I’ll gladly help you. So let’s change off “Display Errors”.

Go to xampp/php and open php.ini with a simple text editor like notepad (I use and recommend notepad++).

Now go to line 531 or search(Ctrl+F) for “display_errors” and replace display_errors = On with display_errors = Off and we are done.

For the settings to be available you have to restart the web server, so go to xampp folder and double click on xampp_restart.exe

Now we can install Joomla!.

Creating a Simple WebSite

You need two things to build a website: a browser and a text editor (I recommend Firefox and Notepad++).

Here you can find more free resources that can help you create your website.

So, open up your text editor and let’s start building the website.

For those how uses Notepad++, don’t forget to change the language to HTML. (Menu->Language->H->HTML).

The page starts with the table on the 7 line. In this table we are going to create the website’s header, menu, content and footer. This table will be only 70% of the browser’s width.

On lines 17 and 41 are the rows that separate content from header and footer.
These rows have blue background which is given by the attribute bgcolor.
This attribute has the value #0000FF, which is the hexadecimal color code.

As you can see from the code we have two columns( two <td></td>). A column for the menu and the other for content.

The menu starts on line 21 and end on line 29. We create the menu with an unordered list.

The content of our web page is located between lines 32 and 37.
For the content we used tags like <p></p> which is for paragraph, <br/> a line break and &nbsp; (space)  which is an entity that makes part of the ISO 8859-1 symbols and mean “non-breaking space”.

And because you will need to know more about entities when you create your website, here is a link that you can save.