Joomla and IPower Web Hosting

As a website designer in Lansdale and Quakertown, I've had the opportunity to work with several web hosting companies over the years. I've used many bad companies, but the one I now trust with all of my websites is IPOWER. They have excellent pricing as well as excellent customer service and technical support.

In a recent project I decided to use Joomla to meet the needs of my client. Joomla is an open source content management system. Read more about Joomla, here. I followed the included directions to install Joomla in my IPOWER web account. The installation is web based, and Joomla checked certain prerequisites prior to the actual installation. This tests for proper configuration on the web server so that you can be sure the installation will be successful.

During my prerequisites check 1 item came up as being a possible issue.It had to do with the PHP Session Path. Well I spent a couple hours trying to resolve this on my own when I finally came across the resolution. I found the fix here. I have also copied the fix below for anyone that may need it.
-----------------------------------
goto the control panel and find the Scripting and Add-Ons section -
click CGI and Scripted Language Support
On this page you will see all the supported languages -
click PHP Scripting - Make your site dynamic with PHP.

On this page you will see bulleted points - the first one Path to your Web document root:
this path is used when you modify the php.ini. If you read the page it tells you to make sure to set the correct php version, depending on what your php runs on - whether php4 or php5.

you can do a simple find - session.save_path - hint the one you need to edit will be this for php5
; where MODE is the octal representation of the mode. Note that this
; does not overwrite the process's umask.
; session.save_path = "/tmp"

just remove the semicolon in front of
session.save_path =
and change the path - here you will use the path on the first line - plus the path to the folder to be used for the session. make sure you enclose the path in quotes "/home/users/web/" - your path will be longer

sessionspath folder - the poster above suggests using chmod 766 but chmod 744 will and is more secure.
Just make sure you create a folder with the premissions
---------------------------

That was it. Now my Joomla is installed and it has been working great since!