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.
t
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/
