do I need Joomla installed on my local computer

[mkarmali1]

My situation is the following:
Someone developed a website using Joomla 1.5 but that person is no longer available.

I'm to make changes to that website. It also uses VirtueMart. All the developer left me is the admin back-end user name and password, although what privileges that combination has, I don't know.

My questions are the following:
1. How do I go about finding out who the host is? I'll need the account username and password.
2. If I'm successful in finding the host, do I need to install Joomla 1.5 on a local machine that I'm going to be working on? or is the admin back-end sufficient to work on changing things like the html etc. on the web pages on the site?

I recently saw a video of someone developing a Joomla website from scratch and it seemed that he did not have to use an ftp program or any thing like that. All he did was add templates, categories, modules, articles in the back-end admin mode and they would automatically be changed on the hosting server. But he installed Joomla (where?) using a one-click install from the host's website.

This causes me to wonder how everything works in Joomla? and my initial question: do I need to install Joomla on my local machine? or do I install an ftp program and contact the host for the user-name and password for ftp'ing the files back and forth?

Thanks,
Any help will be much appreciated!

[toivo]

1. How do I go about finding out who the host is? I'll need the account username and password.

Ping the web domain to find out the IP address of server:

http://ping.eu/ping/

Once you have the IP address of the web server, do a whois query for the IP address and you will get the contact info for the hosting provider:

http://ping.eu/ns-whois/

You should also find out the contact details for the company acting as the registrar of the domain to make sure that there are no issues with the ownership of the domain and that the contact details of the registrant, your company, are correct. Check when the domain registration expires and add the renewal to your task list, before anyone grabs the domain and you have to buy it back:

http://ping.eu/ns-whois/

2. If I'm successful in finding the host, do I need to install Joomla 1.5 on a local machine that I'm going to be working on? or is the admin back-end sufficient to work on changing things like the html etc. on the web pages on the site?

You do not need to install Joomla 1.5 on your local workstation. The admin back end is quite sufficient for editing the site, uploading images and installing extensions.

However, many administrators and owners of web sites like to have a copy of their site on their workstation, to test extensions and upgrades. XAMPP and Wampserver are commonly used as test environments, and Akeeba Backup is a popular extension for to back up a web site and copy it to your workstation.

This causes me to wonder how everything works in Joomla?
https://docs.joomla.org/Portal:Beginners

Joomla 1.5 is quite old and has not been actively supported for some time, therefore its extensions can be vulnerable to hacking. You should consider migrating to a supported version.

[mkarmali1]

Thanks a million Toivo for your quick response. One more question:
In Joomla, how do I download a page, change source code (behind a web page), and then upload it back to the host server.

[toivo]

Pages of content in Joomla are usually just articles. You can find the Article Manager from Contents in the back end menu.

When you find the article from the list or by searching, click its title and it is opened in an editor application. You can either edit the article in Wysiwyg mode or click the toggle button to see the HTML source code. The capabilities of the editor applications vary, depending on the extension. You can have several editors installed but each user has a default editor.

[mkarmali1]

Thanks Toivo!