Getting your own concrete5 site

If you already have a site of your own, you can skip this part. For those without a concrete5 site, you can start by checking out the trial option on the official site: http://www.concrete5.org/about/trial/. On this site, you can get your demo site up and running with just a few clicks. There is no need to download, install, or configure anything. While this is perfectly fine to get acquainted with concrete5, you won't be able to change the files of the system. If you want to get a first impression, go for it, but if you want to play around with the code and layout of your site, make sure you get your own site up and running.

In case you want to run your own site, there are official hosting packages where you get your concrete5 installation without any worries. Check the different packages here:

http://www.concrete5.org/services/hosting/

As concrete5 is an open source CMS, you can, of course, run everything on your own server. The most-used platform is definitely LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). There are a lot of people who run concrete5 on different platforms such as Microsoft IIS. While it's usually not a problem to get concrete5 running as long as the platform supports PHP and MySQL, LAMP is the only officially-supported platform. If possible, make sure you work with Apache on Linux as it's also the platform where you're most likely to get support in case something doesn't work as expected.

You can find information about the installation process, as well as a number of tutorials for different platforms, on the following page:

http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/installation/installing_concrete5/