Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 Content Administration

Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 Content Administration

Overview of this book

Often a company hires consultants or web developers to build a Joomla! web site, and then takes over running the site in house. If you are a content administrator concerned with creating and maintaining the 'product' of a content management site, and not modifying its code, this book is all you need. This practical, hands-on guide will give you all the knowledge needed to maintain and edit your web site as a content-rich place that visitors return to again and again. There are many books available to help you administer a Joomla! site, but this is the only one specifically for Content Administrators. It is a quick-start guide that best serves content administrators and editors and doesn't cover designing or creating a site. However, anybody who has built their own site but needs help with article management, multimedia management, search engine optimization, and more will also benefit from it. To explain all the features, we will work on developing and maintaining the content and structure of a fledgling web site for a fictitious company "The Party People". Beginning with the basics, which includes an exploration of how to access and navigate around the administration interface, you will move into managing and creating content, including adding images, video, and audio material. There is advice on how to make the most of your multimedia material and how to choose the right file type for your needs. As your skills develop, you will work through techniques for making the site search-engine friendly and securing it against potential malicious attacks. All of these techniques and processes are explained step by step, and by the end of the book you will be able to take advantage your new-found knowledge and skills and maintain your Joomla! site with ease. Keeping your content fresh and engaging becomes easy, once you know how and that's what this book aims to do. It will help you become a more effective and efficient manager of Joomla!-based web sites.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5 Content Administration
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface

Getting around the administration


Navigating the administration interface from anywhere within the backend of the site is made easy with a global menu bar to guide you through the various areas of the administration. Located at the top left of every screen (which is why we refer to it as global) the links are named according to the areas they lead to. The global menu bar is as shown in the following screenshot:

Site

This contains links to all of the key site settings, which include the following:

  • Control Panel

  • User Manager

  • Media Manager

  • Global Configuration

  • Logout

Menus

This links to the section where you can organize the management of the menus established on your site. The menu manager link takes you through a list of the menus presented on the frontend of your site, where you can manage them by clicking the links.

Content

All the information presented on the site can be accessed through here, as there are links to the following:

  • Article Manager

  • Article Trash

  • Section Manager

  • Category Manager

  • Front Page Manager

We'll cover the details later in this chapter.

Components

Components are a section of your site that provide a specific functional feature, such as the Newsfeed or a Poll. Any components built into your site can be accessed using this link. Components are covered at the end of this chapter and Chapter 8, Menus, Modules, and Components covers some of the more popular ones in detail.

Extensions

Extensions are extra functional features your site has installed within to customize it. They are referred to as Modules or Plugins. They are also addressed at the end of this chapter and Chapter 8, Menus, Modules, and Components covers some of the more popular ones.

The site template and languages can be managed through here; however, they are for more advanced users and generally best left to your developer to make changes to.

Tools

This menu provides access to a number of useful administrative tools. For example, the administration interface provides the capability to leave messages for other users and they can be accessed through here. The specifics of what users can do are addressed in Chapter 5, User Management in detail, but the Tools menu includes links to the following:

  • Read Messages: Any message sent to you from other users can be accessed.

  • Write Message: A link to send a message to another user.

  • Mass Mail: The link for a Super Administrator to send a message to a group of users.

  • Global Check-in: Allows a user to check what content items are locked or checked out by other users (which can make these items inaccessible to others).

  • Clean Cache: Allows you to clean any cached files from your web server, thereby updating the frontend presentation with any recent changes to your site. The settings are established within the Global Configuration of your site.

  • Purge Expired Cache: This deletes all of the stored cache files on the web server.

Note

Cache files are generated to assist with the efficiency of presenting your site in the web browser. They are files of HTML, images, or other media elements stored for later reuse, making the site load faster the next time it is accessed. However, if changes are made to a site, clearing the cache in the browser (Ctrl+F5) is required to update the content.

Help

A comprehensive list of terms and key phrases are contained within a database of information. This is the site-wide Help database and contains broad information for all areas of the site.