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

Time for action—enable search engine friendly URLs


Let's switch on Joomla!'s friendly URL functionality:

  1. 1. Navigate to Site | Global Configuration. In the Site tab, there's a SEO Settings section. Set Search Engine Friendly URLs to Yes:

  2. 2. Click on Apply and preview the frontend of the website. In the browser, URLs will now look something like this:

    This is much better as these URLs are shorter and easier to understand. However, as you browse your site, you'll see that all URLs share the index.php bit. You can change this using the other SEO Settings. This requires a bit more work than just selecting Yes; you'll also have to rename a file on the web server. Feeling confident? Let's try it out.

    Note

    If you've installed Joomla! locally you may experience some difficulties with the next step that requires renaming a file to .htaccess (with a leading dot). By default, Mac OS Finder and Microsoft Windows Explorer don't allow you to rename filenames starting with a dot. There are several workarounds...