Book Image

Joomla! 1.5: Beginner's Guide

By : Eric Tiggeler
Book Image

Joomla! 1.5: Beginner's Guide

By: Eric Tiggeler

Overview of this book

Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. Although it's a fun and feature-rich tool, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that meets your needs perfectly. Using this book you can create dynamic, interactive web sites that perfectly fit your needs.This practical guide gives you a head start in using Joomla! 1.5, helping you to create professional and good-looking web sites, whether you want to create a full-featured company or club web site or build a personal blog site.The Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide helps beginners to get started quickly and to get beyond the basics to take full advantage of Joomla!'s powerful features. Real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, contemporary, feature-rich web sites any developer can achieve with Joomla!. It gives you a head start and explains what's good and useful about Joomla! features and what's not. The focus is on clear instructions and easy-to-understand tutorials, with minimum of jargon. This book provides clear definitions, thoroughly covering the concepts behind the software and creating a coherent picture of how the software works. This book is not about what Joomla! can do—it's about what you can do using Joomla!.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites

This is what templates do


A Joomla! template is a set of files that contain the HTML and CSS code defining what your website will look like. HTML is the code used to build web pages and CSS is the code used to style them. You could say that HTML is the bricks and mortar of your site, whereas CSS provides the wallpaper and paint. Let's see how this works.

Without any CSS applied, your web browser would display a typical Joomla! site as follows:

With CSS styles applied, the same content is displayed—but now the overall page layout and design is added:

Actually, a template contains more than pure HTML and CSS. To the basic HTML, it adds some instructions (written in the PHP language) that tell Joomla! what content it should place at which position within the HTML page structure. This way, the template instructs Joomla! exactly where it should put the central content, menus, and other modules.

So that's what a template does. Joomla! as such generates only the basic HTML; the template adds to...