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

Creating user-friendly navigation: Cleaning up the Main Menu


When building a site, you'll start by adding links to the Main Menu. It's the mandatory menu that is always part of the Joomla! installation, even if you don't install sample data. But as your site evolves, it can become a long and cluttered list of hyperlinks. Even the menu of our SRUP example site already contains eight links. When you find the Main Menu gets long and messy, what options do you have to improve site navigation?

Option 1: Change the order of menu items

By default, a new menu item is added to the end of the existing menu. If you were to add a new link called New Menu Item, it would show up at the bottom:

In our example site we've haven't paid much attention to menu item order. However, the order in which you add items isn't necessarily the order in which you want them to be displayed to your visitor.