Book Image

Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide

By : Eric Tiggeler
Book Image

Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide

By: Eric Tiggeler

Overview of this book

<p>Joomla! is one of the most popular open source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. It's a free, fun, and feature-rich tool for anyone who wants to create dynamic, interactive websites. Even beginners can deploy Joomla to build professional websites. Even though it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build the site that meets your needs perfectly, this book will guide you through it all.</p> <p>Completely updated for Joomla! 3, this practical guide helps you to create professional and good-looking websites with Joomla!, whether you want to build a personal blog site or a full-featured company or club website.</p> <p>The Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide will help you to get started with Joomla! quickly. It's presented in an organized, easy-to-read manner. The book doesn’t focus on what Joomla! can do - it focuses on what you can do using Joomla!.</p> <p>You learn how to get Joomla! up and running, how to organize content, add new menus, add new features, change the design and much more. Real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, feature-rich websites any web builder can achieve with Joomla!. The focus is on clear instructions and easy-to-understand tutorials, with minimal jargon.</p> <p>Using the "Joomla! 3 Beginner’s Guide" you'll quickly gain the knowledge needed to build your own site, perfectly tailored to your specific needs.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating your own template


Using an existing template (and customizing it) will help you get great results while saving lots of time, compared to creating your own template from scratch. However, if you want full control or need a unique layout you can make a Joomla template all by yourself. It isn't complicated, but it does require a good deal of HTML and CSS coding skills. If you know how to build a website using HTML and CSS, then you won't experience any problems converting your design into a Joomla template. Most of your time and effort will go into creating a page design from the ground up, rather than into the adjustments needed to adapt that design for Joomla.

As it is mainly a question of HTML and CSS coding, we won't cover template creation in full detail here. To get you started, here are a few pointers. These are the five main steps it takes to create your own template:

  • Sketching: Design an overall layout for your website. Where do you want the main content, the navigation, and...