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, although it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build the site that completely meets your needs. This book will help you to start building websites with Joomla quickly, learning step-by-step to get the most out of its advanced features.
Chapter 1, Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites, in this chapter you'll learn why you want to use Joomla to create an advanced, cool-looking site that's easy to expand, customize, and maintain.
Chapter 2, Installation: Getting Joomla Up and Running, helps you learn how to install Joomla on your own computer or on a web server, and how to create a sample site.
Chapter 3, First Steps: Getting to Know Joomla, here, you'll get familiar with the basic concepts of Joomla, the administrative interface, and the principles of a website constructed out of 'building blocks'.
Chapter 4, Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour, here, you'll face a real-life challenge of using Joomla to build a basic but expandable website fast. You'll customize Joomla's default sample site to fit your needs, adding content, menu links, and change the site's look and feel.
Chapter 5, Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Effectively, makes it easy to add and find information on your site by designing a clear, expandable, and manageable structure for your content.
Chapter 6, Creating Killer Content: Adding and Editing Articles, will teach you to create content pages that are attractive and easy to read, and you'll learn about different ways to add images and to to tweak the page layout.
Chapter 7, Welcoming Your Visitors: Creating Attractive Home Pages and Overview Pages, here, you'll create a home page and overview pages to entice visitors to actually read all your valuable content.
Chapter 8, Helping Your Visitors Find What They Want: Managing Menus, will teach you how you can help the visitor to find what they want easily by designing clear and easy navigation through menus.
Chapter 9, Opening Up the Site: Enabling Users to Log In and Contribute, shows how to enable users to log in and allow them to create content and manage the website.
Chapter 10, Getting the Most out of Your Site: Extending Joomla, teaches you on how to extend Joomla's capabilities using all sorts of extensions—using an image gallery to attractively display pictures, automatically showing article teasers on the home page, or enhancing your workspace by installing an easier content editor.
Chapter 11, Creating an Attractive Design: Working with Templates, explains how templates will give your site a fresh look and feel, and make it easy to create an individual look, different from a "typical" Joomla site. You'll also learn to install and customize templates.
Chapter 12, Attracting Search Engine Traffic: SEO Tips and Techniques, will show you how to increase your site's visibility for search engines by applying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, such as creating friendly URLs.
Appendix A, Keeping the Site Secure, will show you some simple, common-sense steps you can take to keep your site safe from hackers or data loss.
Appendix B, Creating a Multilingual Site, here, you'll find a walkthrough of the steps involved in creating a bilingual website, using the multilingual capabilities built into Joomla.
Appendix C, Pop Quiz Answers, contains answers to the multiple choice pop quizzes you will find throughout the book.
To follow the tutorials and exercises in this book, you'll need a computer with Internet access. It's recommended to have a web hosting account so that you can install Joomla online.
The Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide is aimed at anyone who wants to build and maintain a great website and get the most out of Joomla. It helps you build on the skills and knowledge you may already have of creating websites—but if you're new to this subject, you won't have any difficulty understanding the instructions. Of course, we'll touch upon basic terms and concepts (such as HTML and CSS), but if you're not familiar with these, you'll also find references to some web resources.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Action 1
Action 2
Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These are short multiple-choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
These are practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Change the width and height values to reflect the size of the new image. To shift the image a little to the left-hand side, decrease the margin-left value."
A block of code is set as follows:
#logo {
float:left;
background:#e5e5e5;
display:inline-block;
padding:0 20px;
font-size:18px;}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
#logo {
float:left;
background:#e5e5e5;
display:inline-block;
padding:0 20px;
font-size:18px;}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In the Menu Manager: Edit Menu Item screen, click on the Page Display Options panel name on the right-hand side of the screen to open this panel."
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