Book Image

Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

Book Image

Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

Overview of this book

Setting up a basic Joomla! Web site is easy; what comes next is hard and expensive ñ making the site do exactly what and look exactly how you want. With this book in hand, it is easy to adapt your site to bring your vision fully to life. This book will help you to separate your site from the crowd of other Joomla! sites without having to invest in developers. It will guide you through how to customize different parts and aspects of your site and will also show you how to turn your site into a profitable business via these customizations. You will be able to build a successful, professional web site that will adapt to all your business needs. You will be taken beyond the basics of Joomla!, and given an insight into the techniques and tools used by the professionals to rapidly develop unique, custom sites. This will enable you to develop your own professional-quality Joomla! site without assistance, saving you time and money. You will learn how modules, plugins, components, and templates are constructed, and how to make changes in them, giving you the confidence to make more elaborate changes to your site. On top of this will be a look at common problems Joomla! site developers face and how best to deal with them. You will also learn techniques for building a business with Joomla!, as you step through building a subscription-based web business. Towards the end, you will look at marketing and monetizing this business fully to maximize your return.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5x Customization
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Why is it so important to plan?


Planning is important firstly because it keeps us on the right path towards our goal, and secondly it helps us keep our site clean and simple and not succumb to what I call the "Frankensite" effect.

The Frankensite effect

Imagine building a house simply by finding random pieces of nice house fittings, some floor coverings that caught our eye, bathroom and kitchen fittings, doors, and door handles. All of these items picked individually without any thought for the style, size, or appearance of the other items. Then, after we have all the parts we want, finding a block of land, and assembling all the pieces randomly without any plan of what kind of house we want.

I am sure you can imagine the crazy, monstrous house that would result. To do this with a house would be unthinkable for most people.

Many people, however, build their web sites, and even their business in this way. They collect a big list of extensions they want to use and then try to work out what kind...