7. INSTALLATION & BASIC SET-UP Before reading further, please be aware that much of the information contained here is intended for technicians and may be difficult to understand if you have little or no experience in setting up web applications. If you don't understand this topic, you may wish to either seek help, or point your organisation's technical staff to this material.
PREREQUISITES CiviCRM must be installed on a computer that has been configured with a web-server (such as Apache or ngnx), PHP 5.2 or later, and MySQL. Some people prefer to try out CiviCRM on their own local computer before installing it on a dedicated web-server. If you are doing this and don't have the per-requisites just mentioned, you can download packages from the Internet such as WAMP, XAMPP, MAMPP and LAMP, which will quickly install an Apache web server, PHP, and MySQL. (T he first two packages are for Windows and the second two are for the Macintosh and Linux respectively). Before you can begin installation, you need to decide whether you are going to use CiviCRM integrated with Drupal or Joomla!. Refer to the appropriate section in the online CiviCRM Installation Guide for the latest system requirements and specific installation steps: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Installation+and+Upgrades
NETWORK ACCESS Once you are ready to start using CiviCRM in your organization, you'll probably want CiviCRM to be available on the Internet. However, some organizations only want internal staff to have access. In this case they may choose to install CiviCRM on an intranet or local area network.
UPGRADES New versions of CiviCRM are released two or three times a year, and you will need to apply upgrades to your CiviCRM site periodically in order to take advantage of new features and improvements. Some upgrades contain security fixes and it is crucial that these are applied in a timely manner. It's important that you plan for the resources (people and time) required to apply upgrades to your site. You need to plan on testing upgrades on a copy of your live site to make sure the process runs smoothly. It's also critical to make backups of your site and database prior to running an upgrade on your live site even if you had tested the process on a test site. Refer to the appropriate section of the online CiviCRM Installation Guide for specific upgrade procedures. Be sure to select the procedure that is targeted for the environment you are running (Drupal or Joomla!), and the version you are upgrading to.
CONFIGURATION Now that you have CiviCRM installed and running on your web-server, it's time to review the initial configuration tasks which allow you to customize CiviCRM for your organization. You can easily access each of the configuration screens described in the following screen from the Configuration Checklist. Log in to your CiviCRM site and navigate to Administer CiviCRM > Configure > Configuration Checklist. T his section will cover the general tasks, while component-specific configuration will be covered in each component section.
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