Following on the newsletter from last week where we talked about developing locally and moving your site to a live server, this week we're going to walk you through installing Joomla locally, on a Mac.

We're going to use MAMP for this tutorial.

Here's how you do it:

1. Download and install MAMP to your Applications directory.
2. Download the latest Joomla 1.5 zip file.
3. Start MAMP by double clicking on the MAMP icon in your Applications/MAMP directory.
4. Once the servers have started, a browser window should open to the MAMP start page. If not, click on the 'Open start page' in the MAMP window.
5. Set up your database for Joomla by clicking on the phpMyAdmin link in the start page and inserting the name you wish to use for your database in the 'Create new database' field. **For all databases created in MAMP the default username / password is: root / root, and the Host Name that you will use when installing Joomla is: localhost.
6. Copy/move the downloaded version of Joomla 1.5 to your Applications/MAMP/htdocs directory and unzip the file. Leave a copy of this zip file in the htdocs directory for easy creation of multiple Joomla sites ... just unzip the file each time you wish to have a new Joomla installation!
7. Rename the unzipped folder to mysite (or whatever you wish).
8. In your broswer navigate to https://localhost:8888/mysite (or whatever name you gave your directory).
9. Run through the Joomla installation process and voila! (need help installing Joomla? See: https://help.joomla.org/content/category/48/268/302/)

You should now have a shiny new installation of Joomla on your Mac where you can develop your website securely in your local environment.

Video Showing How to Install Joomla Locally on a Mac