Support

Support for the Joomla! CMS can be found on several places. The best place to start would be the Joomla! Official Documentation Wiki. Here you can help yourself to the information that is regularly published and updated as Joomla! develops. There is much more to come too!

Of course you should not forget the Help System of the CMS itself. On the topmenu in the Back-end Control panel you find the Help button which will provide you with lots of explanation on features.

Another great place would of course be the Forum . On the Joomla! Forum you can find help and support from Community members as well as from Joomla! Core members and Working Group members. The forum contains a lot of information, FAQ's, just about anything you are looking for in terms of support.

Two other resources for Support are the Joomla! Developer Site and the Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED). The Joomla! Developer Site provides lots of technical information for the experienced Developer as well as those new to Joomla! and development work in general. The JED whilst not a support site in the strictest sense has many of the Extensions that you will need as you develop your own Web site.

The Joomla! Developers and Bug Squad members are regularly posting their blog reports about several topics such as programming techniques and security issues.

Documentation

Joomla! Documentation can of course be found on the Joomla! Official Documentation Wiki. You can find information for beginners, installation, upgrade, Frequently Asked Questions, developer topics, and a lot more. The Documentation Team helps oversee the wiki but you are invited to contribute content, as well.

There are also books written about Joomla! You can find a listing of these books in the Joomla! Shop.

Joomla! runs on the PHP pre-processor. PHP comes in many flavours, for a lot of operating systems. Beside PHP you will need a Web server. Joomla! is optimized for the Apache Web server, but it can run on different Web servers like Microsoft IIS it just requires additional configuration of PHP and MySQL. Joomla! also depends on a database, for this currently you can only use MySQL.

Many people know from their own experience that it's not easy to install an Apache Web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP, WAMP, and MAMP are easy to install distributions containing Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl for the Windows, Mac OSX and Linux operating systems. These packages are for localhost installations on non-public servers only.
The minimum version requirements are:

• Apache 1.x or 2.x
• PHP 4.3 or up
• MySQL 3.23 or up

For the latest minimum requirements details, see Joomla! Technical Requirements.