My first day with joomla!

Recently, I was asked if I could help someone with joomla. I didn't have any experience with it so I figured the best thing to do was to install it locally on my Windows laptop, which I did using the following instructions from joomla.

XAMMP ( in my case xampp-win32-1.8.3-5-VC11-installer.exe) is a complete, free, easy to install Apache distribution, which contains MySQL, PHP and Perl. Before installing joomla, it was necessary for me to install XAMMP.

Once XAMPP was installed, the control panel could be started from the Start Menu and the individual services need for joomla started by pushing the "Action" Start buttons; shown as Stop buttons below.  

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Now that the necessary software had been installed and was running, it was time to install the joomla web application, which could be downloaded as a zip from here: http://www.joomla.org/download.html

Next, the downloaded zip file was unpacked into the XAMMP installation folder under the htdocs directory. Because the version of joomla was 334, I decided to install it into a folder called joomla334 under htdocs.

Now, using a browser, the joomla installation was continued by calling: http://localhost/joomla334. This started a wizard, which took me through the installation and ended up as follows:

If you haven't already done so, before starting the installation with the browser as described above, it will be necessary to set up a database. This can be done by using the myphpadmin web console, which should have already been started using the control panel.

http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

(Or just go to the control panel and press the "Admin" button for the MySQL installation.)

Over on the left, in the screen shot above, where is says "Neu", you can initiate the database creation. The name of the database, here "stebdb", and user "stebdba" and password will be needed for the joomla installation. 

It was also necessary to make sure that the joomla application user,  "stebdba", had the permissions to log into the database from a given host. In my case, the host name defaulted to "%", which I guess is a wildcard, but which produced problems. Only after I replaced the "%" with "localhost", was I able to configure the database properly with the joomla installation wizard.

At the end of the installation, I was asked to delete the "installation" folder in the %XAMMP_HOME%/htdocs/joomla334 directory. Only after doing, could I continue to either the joomla administrator application using:

http://localhost/joomla334/administrator/index.php

or to the application's front end:

http://localhost/joomla334/

To make back ups of an existing joomla installation, consider akeeba

Simple pgp encryption with gpg

Simple command line encryption and decryption with gpg

Secret and public key rings are in working directory.

Encrypt

>gpg.exe  -e -r mb-pets@bce.tni  --keyring pubring.gpg encryptme.txt
Use this key anyway?yes

//output called encryptme.txt.gpg

Including private key prevents question about trusting public key.

>gpg.exe -e -r mb-pets@bce.int --homedir . --keyring .\pubring.gpg --secret-keyring secring.gpg encryptme.txt

//output called encryptme.txt.gpg

Output encrpyte file as base64 text.

gpg.exe -e -a -r mb-pets@bce.int --homedir . --keyring pubring.gpg  --secret-keyring secring.gpg encryptme.txt

//output called encryptme.txt.asc

//With verbose
>gpg.exe -e -a -r mb-step@ecb.int --homedir . --verbose --keyring pubring.gpg  --secret-keyring secring.gpg encryptme.txt
gpg: using secondary key 57D35DF1 instead of primary key 23E858FE
gpg: This key belongs to us
gpg: reading from `.\encryptme.txt'
gpg: writing to `.\encryptme.txt.asc'
gpg: ELG-E/AES256 encrypted for: "57D35DF1 Statistics STEP Transfer (STEP Mail 1) <mb-step@ecb.int>"


It's also possbile base64 using openssl; I think.
/usr/sfw/bin/openssl enc -base64 -in signme.txt.gpg  -out signme.txt.b64

An attemp to base64 with powershall looked like this; however, beware because this wasn't tested properly.

[System.Convert]::ToBase64String(([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes((get-content ".\signme.txt.gpg")))); set-content (".\signme.txt.asc" );

To unbase 64 it:
[System.Convert]::FromBase64String((get-content ".\signme.txt.asc")); set-content (".\out.gpg" );

Decrypt

>gpg.exe --homedir . --decrypt --secret-keyring .\secring.gpg --keyring .\pubring.gpg .\secret.txt.gpg
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for **********