What is a CMS? broadly speaking a CMS is a system used to manage the content of a Website, it supports the creation, management, publishing, of information to your website.

Joomla! is a Content Management System (CMS) that you can use to build websites and other online applications. Joomla! is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody. It is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. You can Download it ...Here
This Tutorial will guide you through the process of installing joomla on your own local web server.

In this tutorial we are going to install joomla! to a web server that we will be setting up on our own computer.First off we need to download our web server of choice the one I recommend is WAMP5 you can download it Here

Once the download is finished double click on the install package to start the install.

On the next screen we can insert the destination folder for wamp, mine is c:\wamp which is the default.

Next screen up is the mail parameters, just leave these at their default settings and click next.You may get a windows firewall warning about the Apache services, if you are just going to be using Apache as a local testing server on your own machine you can click on the keep blocking button, you can always change the firewall settings later.

Thats it you have now setup your Apache web server with MYSQL and PHP installed.

Now using your browser I recommend firefox, navigate to your website http://localhost if all went well you will see the wamp5 server configuration screen.

Ok now we have the web server set up, its time to install our joomla! CMS, first off extract all the files from the zip archive to your wamp local server, put the files in a folder called joomla, mine is "c:\wamp\www\joomla".Then navigate to the folder with your browser http://localhost/joomla you should see the joomla install screen.

The first list on your pre-installation check are all required for a minimum install as we are installing to a local machine using wamp, all should be good to go. The second list are recommended settings but Joomla! will still operate if your settings do not quite match the recommended.

Next up is the GNU General Public License, read through and click on next.

Ok we now need to fill in our database information the hostname will be “localhost” user name will be "root" leave the password blank as this is only for testing purposes and the MYSQL has no password with the default setup you should assign a user and password to the MYSQL database as soon as possible if you intend to let anyone have access to your server.

Next up is the ftp configuration page, you can leave this blank and click on next, the configuration page is where you give your site a name and enter your details, email and desired password click on install sample data. Installing this is strongly recommended If you are learning joomla?, leave everything else as it is and click on next, if all went well you will see the finished page.

After the install, delete the installations directory in c:\wamp\joomla you now have a working Joomla! CMS installed...Just point your browser at the site and start to populate your CMS.