If you're new to Joomla and Content Management Systems (CMS), 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. However, it's certainly worth the effort, and Joomla will make it easy on you—really! Before we explore the example site you 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 reuse 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—you would be designing...