Often a company hires consultants or web developers to build a Joomla! website, and then takes over running the site in-house. If you are a content administrator concerned with creating and maintaining the product of a content management site, and not modifying its code, this book is all you need.
This practical, hands-on guide will give you all the knowledge needed to maintain and edit your website as a content-rich place that visitors return to again and again. There are many books available to help you administer a Joomla! site, but this is the only one specifically for content administrators. It is a quick-start guide that best serves content administrators and editors and doesn't cover designing or creating a site. However, anybody who has built their own site but needs help with article management, multimedia management, search engine optimization, and more will also benefit from it.
To explain all the features, we will work on developing and maintaining the content and structure of a fledgling website for a fictitious company, "The Party People." As your skills develop, you will work through techniques for making the site search-engine friendly and securing it against potential malicious attacks. All of these techniques and processes are explained step-by-step, and by the end of the book you will be able to take advantage of your new-found knowledge and skills and maintain your Joomla! site with ease. Keeping your content fresh and engaging becomes easy, once you know how, and that's what this book aims to do. It will help you become a more effective and efficient manager of Joomla!-based websites.
Chapter 1: Exploring Your New Joomla! Website covers accessing and navigating the backend or administration interface of a Joomla! website. We will also understand the overall structure and the hierarchy of the content.
Chapter 2: Creating, Editing, and Organizing Content covers the Article Manager, which is used for creating, editing, and organizing content.
Chapter 3: Managing Images and Videos covers the Media Manager. We will learn how to upload and manage audio, video, and images. We also learn how to select the best file formats for our media files.
Chapter 4: Backing Up Your Website covers the backing up and restoring of a Joomla! website in case your site is maliciously attacked or compromised. We'll also outline how to use the JoomlaPack component through the administration interface to create an archive file that can be uploaded and unpacked to restore our website.
Chapter 5: User Management covers the user management system within the administration interface that allows us to effectively manage our website users and their profiles. We will learn to establish and edit new user accounts, manage username and password issues, and deal with problematic users.
Chapter 6: Making Your Site Popular outlines how search engines find websites based on keywords and page descriptions. It also explains how we can apply them to our website and increase the chances of a better ranking in the index page of a search engine result. We also look at some ways we may be able to improve the success of our search engine ranking.
Chapter 7: Security — Recovery and Precaution covers precautions to make it harder for hackers to compromise our website. It explains how to recover from a malicious attack and what to do if your site is exploited
Chapter 8: Menus, Modules, and Components covers applying some of the key components and modules that are a part of the core Joomla! installation, as well as looking at an overview of some third-party extensions such as VirtueMart, JCal Pro, DOCman, and Letterman.
You will need to have Joomla! installed and a website of your own to go through the instructions in the book. Throughout the text we address a number of optional applications such as local host servers or ftp programs and information about them is provided in context.
If you are someone who wants to quickly and easily manage content and users for a Joomla! website, this book is ideal for you. You could be a content editor, proofreader, graphic artist, feature editor, or anyone else concerned with managing content on a Joomla! installation. If you can browse the Web and use a word processing software package, this book will help you develop the skills to efficiently manage your website and gain a solid understanding of the Joomla! content management system.
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 can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
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: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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