Mambo Tutorial and Installation How To

This tutorial describes how to use the Mambo content management software with your NEXCESS.NET web hosting account. NEXCESS.NET specializes in hosting Mambo software and this tutorial is meant to help you quickly setup your site with our web hosting service.

Mambo is open source, meaning that you can use and distribute it as you'd like as long as you don't change it.

For the sake of this tutorial we'll assume that you own the domain 'johnsmith.com' and are setting up Mambo at http://johnsmith.com/mambo/.

Follow these steps to complete the tutorial:

1. The first thing to do is to run through the SiteWorx MySQL tutorial and create a database for Mambo to use to store the information it needs.

   Create a database called 'mambo' with a user named 'mambo'. When you do this SiteWorx will prefix the database and user names with some text resembling your domain name.

   With our example domain of 'johnsmith.com' the database name is 'johnsmit_mambo' and the username is the same 'johnsmit_mambo'.
2. Download the latest version of Mambo from the Mambo website and unzip the contents of the zip file to your desktop using http://winzip.com. You should now have all the files and folders you need to install and run Mambo. Create a folder on your desktop named 'mambo' and move all the files and folders into it. Open up the 'configuration.php-dist' file in your text editing program. You need to enter the information for the database that you created in step #1 into this file so it can be read by the script. You also need to make sure the script knows the correct paths. Scroll down until you see the line that starts with '// Database configuration section'. In this section, you will change the information for the database. For this example, you'll change the information as follows:
   • $mosConfig_host = 'localhost'; // This is normally set to localhost - Stays the same.
   • $mosConfig_user = 'johnsmit_mambo'; // MySQL username
   • $mosConfig_password = 'mypassword'; // MySQL password
   • $mosConfig_db = 'johnsmit_mambo'; // MySQL database name
   • $mosConfig_dbprefix = 'mos_'; // Do not change unless you need to! - Stays the same.

   Now look down at the site specific section. You need to edit two lines in this section. You're going to edit the lines as follows:

   • $mosConfig_absolute_path = '/home/johnsmith.com/html/mambo'; // No trailing slash
   • $mosConfig_live_site = 'http://johnsmith.com/mambo'; // No trailing slash

   You can change the other values according to your preferences but for this example you'll leave them as they are. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Save and close this file and then rename it to 'configuration.php'.
3. Upload the 'mambo' folder to your web hosting account. You can do this using an FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page.

   When all the Mambo files and folders are finished uploading, you need to change permissions on some of the files and folders so the script can access them. You can do this using the CHMOD command in your FTP program. If you don't know how to do this, check out the FTP tutorials on our tutorials page. You'll change the permissions as follows:

   • CHMOD the 'images' folder to 707.
   • CHMOD the 'media' folder to 707.
   • CHMOD the 'uploadfiles' folder to 707.
   • CHMOD the 'components' folder to 707.
   • CHMOD the 'language' folder to 707.
   • CHMOD the 'modules' folder to 707.
   • CHMOD the 'templates' folder to 707.
   • CHMOD the 'administrator/backups' folder to 707.
   • CHMOD the 'administrator/components' folder to 707.
   • CHMOD the 'configuration.php' file to 644.
4. Once you've changed all the permissions on the files, you need to import the 'sql/mambo.sql' file into the database you created in step #1. Before you do this, you need to open the 'sql/mambo.sql' file in your text editing program. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the file and remove the '#' symbol in front of the last 6 lines. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Save and close the 'sql/mambo.sql' file. Now you can import the 'sql/mambo.sql' file into your database. You can do this using the phpMyAdmin system. If you don't know how to do this, check out the phpMyAdmin tutorial on our tutorials page.

5. You can now access the admin control panel. For this example, you'll point to 'http://www.johnsmith.com/mambo/administrator/'. You should now be on the login page for the admin control panel. Enter 'admin' for the username and password fields. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'Login' button to continue. You should now be on the main page of the Mambo admin control panel. Your installation is complete and you can manage and customize your Mambo as you see fit. Don't forget to change your 'admin' account password. The Mambo tutorial is now complete. Your screen should look like this:

   

   For more information on how to use Mambo once it's installed, check out the Mambo FAQs.

Back to web hosting tutorials page