Over this weekend (Friday evening and Saturday) while watching the AFL Finals I got to work building a script to convert the standard Joomla! 1.6 beta packages into a format that would work with Microsoft’s Web Package Installer (WebPI). Early Sunday morning I managed to get everything done to the point that a Joomla! 1.6 package is automatically converted, stripping out the install and sample data scripts on the fly and reprocessing them as well as updating a WebPI feed XML file that you can use.

The long and the short is if you want to test out the latest Joomla! 1.6 beta release (beta 9 at the moment), all you have to do is add our own custom feed to the Web Platform Installer!

The first step is to get the Web Platform Installer. The easiest way of doing this is going to Microsoft’s Web Platform download page and then download and install the Web Platform Installer. From here it’ll load and have a list of tabs on the left and some content on the right. At the very bottom left of the screen will be an option button that you can select. This will open up a window which has a text box around the middle with a button that says “Add Feed”. This box allows you to add custom feeds to WebPI to enable my custom Joomla! 1.6 feed to work. In the box put in the following URL: “http://update.joomla.org/webpi/webpi.xml” and click “Add Feed”. Hit ok and the screen should refresh and a new “Joomla!” tab should appear. Under the tab there should be a few options, I’ve tagged Joomla! a few different times (in future I might add nightly builds for both 1.5 and 1.6 to aide testing) but there is only on 1.6 Beta package. From here you should be able to install Joomla! and in theory it should download and configure any dependencies (e.g. IIS, PHP on IIS and MySQL).

As a word of warning, if you’re already set up using XAMPP or similar this might interfere with those environments however if you’re new and wanting to get into testing Joomla! 1.6 Beta on Windows and IIS (we always need more IIS testers), this should make your life much easier!