How to install Nucleus CMS in XAMPP Windows 11

Nucleus CMS is an open-source, lightweight content management system. It was developed by The Nucleus Group. It was first released in 2022 and its final release was on September 22, 2014. For this tutorial, we are going to create a website out of it for free using XAMPP in our Windows pc. But first, you need to download the given files below.

Requirements:

• xampp-win32-1.6.3-installer [download here]
• nucleus3.65 [download here]

Assuming that you already downloaded the XAMPP and Nucleus CMS zip file, continue doing the tutorial below.

Table of Contents

• XAMPP Installation
• Opening XAMPP Control Panel and running Apache and MySQL
• Copying and pasting Nucleus CMS installation folder to HTDOCS
• Creating a Database for Nucleus CMS installation using phpMyAdmin
• Installing Nucleus CMS using XAMPP localhost via web browser
• Opening Nucleus website homepage
• Opening Nucleus website admin page

Here are the steps on how to install Nucleus CMS using XAMPP in Windows pc

XAMPP Installation

1. Open the XAMPP file that you downloaded. In the Installer Language, select English and press OK to proceed.

2. In the Welcome to XAMPP 1.6.3 Setup Wizard, just press NEXT to proceed.

3. In the Choose Install Location, do not change the default location. Press NEXT to proceed.

4. In the XAMPP Options, uncheck every option and press INSTALL to proceed.

5. Wait for the installation to finish.

6. When done, click Finish to exit the installer.

Opening XAMPP Control Panel and running Apache and MySQL

1. To open XAMPP Control Panel, just click its shortcut in your desktop or go to Start and search for "xampp" and press ENTER. Inside, click on the Start buttons for Apache and MySQL.

2. Apache and MySQL are both running now.

Copying and pasting Nucleus CMS installation folder to HTDOCS

1. Extract the Nucleus zip file that you downloaded. Rename the extracted folder as "nucleus". Make sure all the content of your nucleus folder is not inside a sub-folder. Copy your nucleus folder. Go to This PC.

2. Inside This PC, open C drive.

3. Then open xampp folder.

4. Inside xampp, open htdocs folder.

5. And inside htdocs, paste your nucleus folder.

Creating a Database for Nucleus CMS installation using phpMyAdmin

1. We are going to create database needed for our Nucleus website installation. Open your web browser and go to 127.0.0.1 and press ENTER. In the Language selection, click English.

2. Inside, under Tools, click phpMyAdmin.

3. In the Create new database, name your database as nucleus_db. Next to it, set it to utf8_unicode_ci and press Create.

4. In the Create new table, name your table as nucleus_table and set the Number of fields to 4. Press Go to proceed.

5. In the Field, name it as nucleus and set the Type to INT.

6. Set Collation to utf8_unicode_ci and leave all the other fields blank.

7. Save your work.

8. And you have successfully created the database with its table needed for our Nucleus website installation.

Installing Nucleus CMS using XAMPP localhost via web browser

1. We are now ready to install our website. Open your web browser and go to 127.0.0.1/nucleus/install.php and press ENTER.

2. We are now inside the installation page.

3. Under General Database Settings, do the following: Hostname - localhost, Username - root, Password - blank or none, Database - nucleus_db. Leave table prefix as it is.

4. Leave Directories and URLs to default. Do not change its values.

5. Under Administrator User, do the following: Display Name - admin, Real Name - Administrator, Password - your desired admin password and confirm it (do not forget it), Email address - enter a valid email.

6. For Weblog Data do the following: Blog Name - name your blog or website, Blog Short Name - just the short name for your blog/website. Leave Weblog Ping as it is and press Install Nucleus to start the installation.

7. Nucleus installation is completed!

8. After a successful installation, you need first to delete both the install.php and install.sql files located inside your nucleus folder in the htdocs directory.

9. To delete these files, go to This PC > C drive > xampp > htodcs > nucleus. Find and delete the install.sql and install.php files.

Opening Nucleus website homepage

1. To open your Nucleus website homepage, go to 127.0.0.1/nucleus or localhost/nucleus.

Opening Nucleus website admin page

1. To open your Nucleus website admin account, go to 127.0.0.1/nucleus/nucleus. If a "Security Risk" page appears instead of the Login page, then, you need to fixed it first. Do the tutorial below.

How to change the permissions on config.php back to 444 for security

• Go to c:\xampp\htdocs\nucleus and find config.php
• Right-click open with Notepad
• Find include($DIR_LIBS.'globalfunctions.php');
• Below it type this line of code chmod('C:\xampp\htdocs\nucleus\config.php', 0444);
• Save Notepad

2. Refresh the 127.0.0.1/nucleus/nucleus page and the page below should be shown now.

3. Login your username which is admin and your password. Press Log In to proceed.

4. Inside your administration page, you will see links, and settings, that you can use to modify settings and contents of your Nucleus website. This is only available to you as the owner and administrator of your website.

Thank you for reading this tutorial guys. I do hope that you have learned a lot while doing this. If you have a question, you can leave a comment below. Cheers!