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

Time for action—activating a different template


Time for a little experiment! Let's try a different template on for size. Joomla! comes with a few different templates. They're pre-installed; you only have to set them to be the new default template. In this example, we'll choose the JA Purity template:

  1. 1. Navigate to Extensions | Template Manager.

  2. 2. Select the radio button next to JA Purity. Click on the Default button in the toolbar to set JA Purity to be the default template. Click on Preview to see the results:

What just happened?

Same content, different design; by setting JA Purity to be the new default template you've given the site a completely new look. The ability to change templates in a few clicks is one of the things that really makes Joomla! stand out. Without needing any coding skills you can completely transform the site's appearance.

Have a go hero—adjust the template settings

The JA Purity template has a many settings (or Parameters, as Joomla! calls them). They allow you to...