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

Creating the perfect home: Mastering home page layout


The main content area in any Joomla! home page is driven by the Front Page Component—it's the thing that tells Joomla! what to display in the main content area (the mainbody) of the home page. When you've installed Joomla! with the sample data, the home page mainbody will show:

  • One introductory article text over the full width of the mainbody

  • Four intro texts divided into two columns

  • A list of links to other articles

You can see this in action in the screenshot at the beginning of this chapter.

This default setup is suited for many types of content rich sites. But you're certainly not limited to using this one combination of intro texts and links in the home page mainbody. Joomla!'s Front Page Component offers you a vast amount of choices on how to display content in it, and what to display.

Changing the way your home page is arranged

It's your client on the phone, telling you that—happy as they are with their new site—some SRUP staff members...