Book Image

Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide

By : Eric Tiggeler
Book Image

Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide

By: Eric Tiggeler

Overview of this book

<p>Joomla! is one of the most popular open source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. It's a free, fun, and feature-rich tool for anyone who wants to create dynamic, interactive websites. Even beginners can deploy Joomla to build professional websites. Even though it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build the site that meets your needs perfectly, this book will guide you through it all.</p> <p>Completely updated for Joomla! 3, this practical guide helps you to create professional and good-looking websites with Joomla!, whether you want to build a personal blog site or a full-featured company or club website.</p> <p>The Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide will help you to get started with Joomla! quickly. It's presented in an organized, easy-to-read manner. The book doesn’t focus on what Joomla! can do - it focuses on what you can do using Joomla!.</p> <p>You learn how to get Joomla! up and running, how to organize content, add new menus, add new features, change the design and much more. Real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, feature-rich websites any web builder can achieve with Joomla!. The focus is on clear instructions and easy-to-understand tutorials, with minimal jargon.</p> <p>Using the "Joomla! 3 Beginner’s Guide" you'll quickly gain the knowledge needed to build your own site, perfectly tailored to your specific needs.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Making the switch – building websites the Joomla way


If you're new to Joomla and to Content Management Systems (CMSes), you'll find creating sites using a CMS takes a bit of getting used to. Even if you have some experience building websites, you'll have to adapt to a different way of working. But it's certainly worth the effort, and Joomla will make it easy on you—really! Before we explore the example site you've installed in the previous chapter, we'll have a brief look at just what's so different about building websites with Joomla.

As you may know, ages ago—at least before 2005, when Joomla came to be—most websites were handcrafted. Creating a website meant creating pages. For every new web page, you had to create a separate HTML document. You would design a basic page layout and re-use that over and over again, adding new pages and adapting the layout to fit the type of content. Whatever tool you used—Adobe (then Macromedia) Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage, or maybe a plain text editor...