Do you spend a lot of time customising a Joomla setup when you start creating your site? Here is a step by step guide to short cut a lot of the setup process to get your project running faster.

Create the prototype.

The first step is to create the prototype installation that you will use as the base. Gather together the base components, modules and mambots you ant to use and install them on your prototype.

Also put together any dummy text, images, populate categories and sections that you want to use or use regularly. I also remove the weblink categories, newsfeeds and any other categories that I tend not to ever use.

When you are doing this you really need to think about any task that you do everytime you build a Joomla site from scratch.

We do all of this using the local server as it is much faster.

Making the zip.

Once you have your prototype together you need to create the installer.

1. For the sake of avoiding confusion with multiple installations of Joomla, copy the entire prototype folder to a new working folder.

2. Unzip the latest Joomla package to another folder. You need to make sure that the version you created the prototype in is the same as the zip you just unzipped.

3. Copy the entire installation directory and paste it into the newfolder you just pasted the protype into.

   1. Delete the configuration.php file in the that folder.

4. Navigate to php myadmin on your local server and export the contents of your prototype database.

5. Copy the content of this database into the sample-content.sql in the installation folder of your prototype directory. For Joomla 1.0 you'll find it here: installation/sql/sample_data.sql and in Joomla 1.5 i installation/sql/mysql/sample_data.sql.

6. All that is left is to zip up the entire prototype folder. Now you have a personalised Joomla quickstart package.

Its best to try and install the package as a test but if you follow those steps you should have a working installable customised version of Joomla at your fingertips any time you are ready to start working with a new project.