Book Image

Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

Book Image

Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

Overview of this book

Setting up a basic Joomla! Web site is easy; what comes next is hard and expensive ñ making the site do exactly what and look exactly how you want. With this book in hand, it is easy to adapt your site to bring your vision fully to life. This book will help you to separate your site from the crowd of other Joomla! sites without having to invest in developers. It will guide you through how to customize different parts and aspects of your site and will also show you how to turn your site into a profitable business via these customizations. You will be able to build a successful, professional web site that will adapt to all your business needs. You will be taken beyond the basics of Joomla!, and given an insight into the techniques and tools used by the professionals to rapidly develop unique, custom sites. This will enable you to develop your own professional-quality Joomla! site without assistance, saving you time and money. You will learn how modules, plugins, components, and templates are constructed, and how to make changes in them, giving you the confidence to make more elaborate changes to your site. On top of this will be a look at common problems Joomla! site developers face and how best to deal with them. You will also learn techniques for building a business with Joomla!, as you step through building a subscription-based web business. Towards the end, you will look at marketing and monetizing this business fully to maximize your return.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5x Customization
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Practical—picking our tools


I have listed quite a few good tools above, now it's time to pick a set of tools for ourselves before we continue further. Having the right development environment from the start is much easier than trying to change half-way through development.

The rest of the examples in this book will be based mainly around my own environment, but all of them will be achievable regardless of the environment you choose.

The only exception to this is Firefox and Firebug. I cannot emphasis enough how important this one tool will be to the development of a site, and as of the time of writing there is no other tool that can achieve quite the same results as it can as easily.

Demonstration environment:

  • PC Operating System: Macintosh OSX

  • File Transfer / FTP Client: Coda + Transmit

  • Program Code Editor / IDE: Coda

  • Image Editor: Adobe Fireworks

  • Primary Web Browser: Firefox + Firebug + Web Developer Toolbar

  • Database Management: phpMyAdmin + EasySQL

  • Source Code / SVN Repository: Unfuddle.com

  • Source...