Book Image

Joomla! 1.5: Beginner's Guide

By : Eric Tiggeler
Book Image

Joomla! 1.5: Beginner's Guide

By: Eric Tiggeler

Overview of this book

Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. Although it's a fun and feature-rich tool, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that meets your needs perfectly. Using this book you can create dynamic, interactive web sites that perfectly fit your needs.This practical guide gives you a head start in using Joomla! 1.5, helping you to create professional and good-looking web sites, whether you want to create a full-featured company or club web site or build a personal blog site.The Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide helps beginners to get started quickly and to get beyond the basics to take full advantage of Joomla!'s powerful features. Real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, contemporary, feature-rich web sites any developer can achieve with Joomla!. It gives you a head start and explains what's good and useful about Joomla! features and what's not. The focus is on clear instructions and easy-to-understand tutorials, with minimum of jargon. This book provides clear definitions, thoroughly covering the concepts behind the software and creating a coherent picture of how the software works. This book is not about what Joomla! can do—it's about what you can do using Joomla!.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites

Customizing a template: Tweaking CSS styles


Many Joomla! users are perfectly happy using templates out of the box. However, often a template needs just a few tweaks to make it fit your needs.

In the beginning of this chapter you learned that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) take care of your website's look and feel. If you want to change way the site looks, you'll edit the styles in its CSS file (or CSS files, as the template designer may have chosen to split the necessary code in different stylesheet files).

If you're not familiar with CSS and what it does, have a look at the basic explanation in the following section. After that, we'll see how tweaking CSS code works. Later in this chapter you'll find some useful resources explaining CSS in more detail (see Expanding your CSS knowledge).

Understanding the very basics of CSS

Before we try this out on our example site and customize the template we've just installed, let's have a look at the basics of CSS coding. In Joomla!, HTML and CSS codes...