Book Image

Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

Book Image

Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

Overview of this book

Setting up a basic Joomla! Web site is easy; what comes next is hard and expensive ñ making the site do exactly what and look exactly how you want. With this book in hand, it is easy to adapt your site to bring your vision fully to life. This book will help you to separate your site from the crowd of other Joomla! sites without having to invest in developers. It will guide you through how to customize different parts and aspects of your site and will also show you how to turn your site into a profitable business via these customizations. You will be able to build a successful, professional web site that will adapt to all your business needs. You will be taken beyond the basics of Joomla!, and given an insight into the techniques and tools used by the professionals to rapidly develop unique, custom sites. This will enable you to develop your own professional-quality Joomla! site without assistance, saving you time and money. You will learn how modules, plugins, components, and templates are constructed, and how to make changes in them, giving you the confidence to make more elaborate changes to your site. On top of this will be a look at common problems Joomla! site developers face and how best to deal with them. You will also learn techniques for building a business with Joomla!, as you step through building a subscription-based web business. Towards the end, you will look at marketing and monetizing this business fully to maximize your return.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5x Customization
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Customizing components


Components are considerably more difficult to make changes to than any other extension, and so we must take great care when working with them.

Usually, most web site developers will be happy with the functionality provided, but sometimes we can make slight tweaks to a component in order to give our web site a little bit of extra functionality.

However, there is one kind of common change many web site owners will, and should, make to their components. That change is to customize the appearance of the components so that they blend with the template.

If we remember our earlier discussion on the Frankensite syndrome, unmatched templates and components are one of the most common examples of this. It makes it immediately obvious that our site is either a CMS, a mash-up of different scripts, or just run by someone with terrible taste. We don't want people thinking any of these about our web business.

Because we want our business to succeed, we need to make some changes to the...