If you don’t have your own webserver, or if you don’t want to waste your traffic on uploading your files everytime you make a small edit, you should consider running it all locally, and then when you’re done uploading it to your server.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of WordPress, and I have been using it for ages. But for some clients, WordPress is overkill. There’s a lot of Content Management Systems out there, and a lot of them suck, lack features, or have too many features. But then I found Concrete5, which is absolutely amazing.

But enough about that (go to Concrete5′s website to read more). Today we’ll be installing Concrete5 locally. Although this tutorial is about installing Concrete5, you can use the same methods to install e.g. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or even your own content management system.

The methods used here can also be used for installing Concrete5 locally on Windows and Linux. Instead of MAMP, you have to use WAMP (Windows) or LAMP (Linux).

Overview

MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is a piece of software developed by living-e AG, which makes using PHP and MySQL locally a lot easier. First of all, let’s start by having an overview of what we’ll be learning today:

1. Downloading and installing MAMP
2. Downloading and installing Concrete5
3. Conclusion

And no, there’s not more to it – so let’s get rollin’!

Downloading and installing MAMP

Download MAMP (130 MB) and drag the MAMP folder into your Applications folder. Opening MAMP will also launch your default browser with a welcome page. We’ll return to that in a moment. First, let’s have a look at the application. If everything is working, you should see to green ‘lamps’ – one for Apache Server and one for MySQL server. Click on ‘Preferences…’ and go to the ‘Apache’ tab. You’ll see this:

Choose the path where you keep all your websites and hit ‘OK’. There’s no reason to mess with MAMP’s default settings unless you e.g. use the default ports for something else, so we’ll close the ‘Preferences’ window.

Go to your browser, which should have opened the welcome page. We’ll keep that page open.

Downloading and installing Concrete5

If you haven’t heard of Concrete5, now’s the time. It’s a wonderful CMS released under the MIT license, which means you can “[...] call it ‘Cement’ and sell it for a million bucks [...]“. So, go to Concrete5.org and download your copy. You can also play with the demo or watch the screencast.

Extract Concrete5 to the folder you specified in MAMP’s preferences. Now, go back to MAMP’s welcome page and click on phpMyAdmin. Create a new database – let’s call it concrete.

So, our database is setup, now we need to setup Concrete5. I put my Concrete5 files in a folder called ‘concrete’ in the folder specified in MAMP earlier. Go to MAMP’s welcome page again, and notice the following information:

Go to the local folder where you stored concrete, and press Command + I. You have to change Sharing & Permissions for Everyone to Read & Write:

Now go to http://localhost:8888/concrete/, or whatever you named your folder (if you chose another port in MAMP’s preferences, also change 8888 to that). You’ll see this site:

Now, paste the information from the welcome page under ‘Database’ information, and give your database a name, e.g. ‘concrete’, and hit ‘Install Concrete’. You should now be given a login name and a password. Remember this, and change it as soon as you have logged in.

Conclusion

That’s it! You have installed Concrete5 locally on Mac OS X. If you want to install other stuff, just put it in the folder specified in MAMP and go to http://localhost:8888/that_folders_name/.

Have I forgotten something? Please leave a comment!