How To Install TYPO3 on Lunarpages Hosting

Managing a corporate website’s content can be a somewhat complicated task, particulary if you’re using static pages. Up to this day, the government branch I work for used Adobe Contribute CS3 to manage a handful of websites.

But lately we’ve decided to take a new approach to content management and instead of using a software-based solution, we’ve headed for a web-based CMS.

TYPO3 is a free Open Source CMS (Content Management System) for enterprises. It can be used for publishing web pages on either the Internet or an intranet. It has a frontend to deliver web pages to visitors and a backend for content management. The backend is web-based so there’s no need to install a software on the end-user’s computer.

I could go on and on about introducing TYPO3 since it does so much stuff but instead I invite you to visit TYPO3′s website. The point of this post is rather to show you how to install TYPO3 on a cPanel hosting account.

How To Install TYPO3 on Lunarpages Account

In some cases, TYPO3 can be installed automatically using Fantastico Deluxe, an automated script installer. But some web hosts do not make TYPO3 available for installation through Fantastico so you have do it manually.

Lunarpages is among those who have chosen not to make TYPO3 available in Fantastico for some reasons. Now don’t get me wrong: Lunarpages is one of the best web hosts out there. This is why I chose them to show you how to install TYPO3.

Step 1: Creating a MySQL Database

The first thing you’ll need to do is to create a MySQL database. Start by logging into your cPanel control panel (http://www.yourdomain.com:2082) and click on the MySQL icon.

In the New Database field, enter the name for your new database and hit the Create Database button.

cPanel will then confirm you that the database has been created so click on the Go Back link because we’re not done with the MySQL part yet. We now need to create a user for this database. Still on the MySQL page, enter a username and password in the corresponding fields and click on Create User.

Again cPanel will bring you to a confirmation page saying that the MySQL user account has been created. Click on the Go Back link again. We’ll now associate this user account to our newly created database by selecting the account and database and checking the ALL privileges checkbox like this:

Click on Add User To Database and you’re now done with the MySQL part!

Step 2: Getting TYPO3 and Uploading it to Your Hosting Account

Head over to http://www.typo3.org and click on the Download link from the main menu. You will be presented with two different versions of TYPO3. One is to be installed on a web server while the other one is for installation your local computer. Click on the link to download the web server version in zip/tar.gz format.

Now be careful as you’ll need to download two files here. You’re gonna need to get the skeleton site as well as the source files. It doesn’t really matter if you choose the ZIP or the Tar.GZ format.

Save the files to your hard drive and extract their content to a temporary folder using your favorite compression / extraction utility (such as Winzip, WinRAR or ZipGenius).

Launch your favorite FTP client (such as Filezilla) and establish a connection to your hosting account. Usually you can use the same username / password combination as for cPanel.

Upload the content extracted from both archives to your public_html folder. During the upload, you’ll see that somes files from the skeleton archive have the same name has some other files from the source archive. At this point it doesn’t matter if you overwrite the previous files or not because they are both the same.

This is what the public_html folder should look like when you’re done uploading all the files:

Step 3: Installing TYPO3

Before going any further, you must know that TYPO3 requires PHP5 in order to work. By default, Lunarpages has PHP4 enabled so you must disable it and enable PHP5 instead. This can be achieved by click on the “Enable/Disable PHP5″ icon in cPanel. If you need to enable PHP5 for an addon domain, click here.

Using your favorite text editor, create a file named ENABLE_INSTALL_TOOL (all in uppercases). This file can be empty, it doesn’t matter. Upload this file to /public_html/typo3conf

Now open your browser to http://www.yourwebsite.com and you should be greeted with a TYPO3 installation page. Let’s fill in the information to connect to your database and hit Continue:

On the next page (step 2 from Typo3′s installation wizard), select the database from the dropdown menu. Don’t enter anything the “Create a new database” field. Click on Continue.

Click on Import database from the next page. We don’t really have any database to import since this is a new TYPO3 installation. This will create the default tables.

You are now done installing TYPO3! Of course there are various things you must do to secure TYPO3. Log into your TYPO3 backend (http://www.yourdomain.com/typo3) and follow the instructions from the yellow box that appears at the top.

Links

• TYPO3 Website
• Lunarpages Website
• cPanel Web Hosting Providers