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

The frontend: The website as the user sees it


Let's first explore the elements of the default Joomla! example site home page. This will give you a good overview of the different modules that Joomla! features out of the box.

The example site that's part of the default installation is just one of the many types of sites you can build with Joomla!. As you can see, the example is focused on presenting quite a lot of (some might say, too much) information, the home page pulling the reader towards the content through intro texts, banners, link lists, a poll, several menus, and so on. It's very much focused on text; the only image you'll see is a banner ad at the bottom.

The previous picture of the home page shows the following elements:

  • News Flash: Shows a random news flash each time the page is loaded

  • Top Menu: A menu at the top of the page

  • Breadcrumbs: The pathway to the current page

  • Search: The search box—the search results are shown in the main content area

  • In the left-hand side column...