Additional customizations

At this point you can point your browser to your site's URL as entered in VirtualHost configuration, and follow the steps to get your Joomla! 1.5 site installed. After installation, you can log onto the administrator backend for further customizations.

You may want to configure SEO settings to get search engine optimized URLs for your Web site. First, enable these two features in the Global Configuration.

Search Engine Friendly URLs
Add suffix to URLs

The URLs of links on your site should become something similar to http:/<your domain name>//index.php/joomla-license.html.

If after you enabled Search Engine Friendly URLs and got broken Web pages when following a link on your site, please make sure the file configuration.php in your Joomla! 1.5 directory has the $live_site variable correctly set. For example,

var $live_site = 'http://<your domain name>';

To remove the string index.php in the URL, you will have to enable the last SEO setting:

Use Apache mod_rewrite

And copy or rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess. In the file .htaccess, if the following line gives error, please comment it out.

Options +FollowSymLinks

That's because we have already the line in the VirtualHost configuration. Your Apache configuration probably doesn't allow changing Options, and we have already set the FollowSymLinks option in the VirtualHost configuration. You may have to restart your HTTP server to see the effects of the changes.