Setting up a basic Joomla! web site is a relatively simple process, and there have been many articles and books outlining the process. However, the next step proves difficult, and often expensive for most people, but it is the most important one. That is customizing the site to bring their vision fully to life. Understanding how and why to make these customizations, is essential to having a successful, professional site, but there has been very little written about how to take this step.
This book will help you to take your web site to this next step, guiding you through how to customize different parts and aspects of your site, allowing you to separate your site from the crowd of other Joomla! sites without having to pay an arm and a leg hiring developers to do it for you. It will also show you how to turn your site into a profitable business via these customizations.
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 to 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 we step through building a subscription-based web business. Then we will look at marketing and monetizing this business fully to maximize our return.
Chapter 1 The Skills Required to Customize Joomla!—You will be given a clear understanding of why Joomla! came to be and how it fits into the Internet ecosystem, and how the technologies of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL fit together to help you produce your site.
Chapter 2 Setting Up Our Environment—Here, you will be introduced some of the tools and the environment used by professionals to ensure that their work is done as swiftly as possible while still maintaining top quality.
Chapter 3 Planning Our Site—Before we get into the actual building of the site, we will cover how to plan your site properly and why this is essential to a successful site. You will also be shown how to choose the best extensions for building your desired site.
Chapter 4 Installing and Configuring Extensions—Here, you will see how to clean out a new Joomla! installation of unneeded content and extensions, then how to install and configure most of your extensions. We will also begin work on our example site.
Chapter 5 Installing and Modifying Templates—Here we will show you how to find, choose, and then customize a template to match the needs of your site, making changes to the HTML, CSS, PHP, and images.
Chapter 6 Customizing Modules—After templates we will look at how to customize the functionality and appearance of modules so that they can do what we need. You will be shown how a Joomla! module is designed and built.
Chapter 7 Customizing Plugins—In a similar style to Chapter 6, we will look at how plugins operate within Joomla, and then at how to modify the output of a content plugin.
Chapter 8 Customizing Components—The most difficult of extensions to modify, components, are made clear in this chapter. You will understand how to identify the differences between traditional style and modern style Joomla! components and then make changes to one to better suit our site.
Chapter 9 Finding and Fixing Problems—Here we will look a some of the common problems Joomla! web site developers face, and the ways we can solve them.
Chapter 10 Promoting and Tracking—In this chapter you will learn different methods for promoting and marketing your web site successfully, and how to track that success.
Chapter 11 Monetizing Our Site—The final chapter will go over some different methods for monetizing your site, extending what we have done in our sample site.
You will need a correctly installed Joomla! 1.5 web site, and a working Internet connection.
This book is written for people with basic knowledge of Joomla!, who want to expand their skills and move from simply assembling extensions, and installing a template to truly customizing their own site.
Readers are expected to have functional knowledge of Joomla! and a very basic understanding of terms such as FTP, PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, even if they have no real knowledge of the workings behind these terms. This book does not cover topics such as installing Joomla! and extensions, or creating content.
The ideal reader is one who wishes to build a successful business web site using Joomla! and is interested in making as well as saving money by applying professional tools and techniques to the development, monetization, and marketing of their site. Non-business focused site owners can still benefit greatly from the book, however, if they wish to add a level of professionalism to their work.
In this book, you will 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: "We take the $article parameter which was passed in, and we are going to assign a new value to its text attribute."
A block of code will be set as follows:
class plgContentNJaccess extends JPlugin {
function plgContentNJaccess ( &$subject ) {
parent::__construct( $subject );
$this->_plugin = JPluginHelper::getPlugin('Content', 'ninjaacess');
$this->_params = new JParameter($this->_plugin->params);
}
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be shown in bold:
<files>
<filename module="mod_fbmodule">mod_fbmodule.php</filename> <filename>index.html</filename> <filename>helper.php</filename>
<folder>tmpl</folder>
</files>
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 our text like this: "Next, click on Extensions | Module Manager and find our module."
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