Book Image

Building job sites with Joomla!

Book Image

Building job sites with Joomla!

Overview of this book

Joomla! is a content management system that helps both novice users and expert developers to create powerful websites. Joomla! has extensions for construcing job sites; web sites for handling employment and careers. It can take hours to build even an elementary job site but imagine yourself building a job site such as Monster, CareerBuilder, a niche job listing such as TechCrunch or your own company job site within few minutes and with minimal development efforts.Building job sites with Joomla! shows you how to create your own job site with Joomla! with the Jobs! Pro extension. From the basic installation and configuration, you will see all the steps required to assemble a working job site in next to no time.This book is a step-by-step tutorial for creating a job site using Joomla!. First you will set up a server environment to install Joomla! 1.5 and Jobs!. Next you will learn how you can use Jobs! configuration settings to control the components of your job site such as adding companies, adding social bookmarking buttons, enabling the users to post their resume online and so on. You will learn to easily manage your site using the Jobs! control panel. This will be followed by using job site template to quickly create a job site and simultaneously test the site you have created. Next you will learn how to speed up the communication between employers and the jobseekers using e-mail templates. You can also entirely control user registration system from Jobs! Pro admin panel. You will also learn to add and manage job types, job categories, and applications to keep your database organized and to keep track of the application status. You will also learn to add a jobseeker or an employer and to manage resume fields. Then you will configure credit systems to charge an amount of money to users according to the specific service provided. By the end of this book you will learn to professionally optimize your Joomla! Job site for search engines and look at list of words that need to be avoided in the URLs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Building job sites with Joomla!
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface
Online Resource
Search Engine Stop Words

Installing and configuring Jobs!


Installation of Jobs! is very simple; you will only need to install using the installer tool of the extensions manager. Before installing and configuring the Jobs! extension, get it from developer InstantPHP's website: http://www.instantphp.com. It is available only with a commercial license. Jobs! comes with some modules and plugins. To install and configure Jobs! extension, you need to follow these steps:

  1. 1. First click on the menu Extensions | Install/Uninstall to open the Extensions Manager window, as shown in the following screenshot:

  1. 2. In the Extensions Manager window, click on Browse in the install section and look for the installer file called com_jobs_XXX.zip of the Jobs! extension package you have purchased. Then click on Upload & Install, as shown in the following screenshot:

Note

If you get an error during installation stating that the folder com_jobs is already in use, you must check that …/components/com_jobs folder must not be used by any other component.

When the installation completes successfully, you will see the message Install Component Success. Now, you need to install some modules. Modules and plugins are also extensions, so you can install all modules and plugins in the same way. Jobs! comes with some modules, plugins, and templates. You will find them in a folder named Plugin and Modules in the Jobs! extension package. You need to install some important modules to make your website functional. The Jobs! module—mod_jobs —is one of them and it is the main module. You must install it to access the Jobs! component in the website's frontend. In this way, you can install other modules such as search module, categories module, latest jobs, random jobs, and so on. Also, you can install any plugin and template file later. If you need more information and support you can go to InstantPHP's support page: http://www.instantphp.com/support/21-jobs-support.html.

  1. 3. Jobs! is now installed along with some of its modules. After installing the Jobs! Component, you need to configure it. First, add at least one application status and be sure that it's published because it is one of the key features of Jobs! and so it is essential to enable the jobseeker application system. It will set the default status when an application is received from a jobseeker. To add a new application status, click on the menu Components | Jobs | List Application Status, as shown in the following screenshot:

After that, click on Add New and provide some status name for online application in the new window and save it as published. Application status is a classification of applications received from the candidates. Some basic examples are:

  • Pending

  • Under review

  • Rejected

  • Accepted

Click on menu Components | Jobs | Configuration and check the Default Status drop-down list in the General Settings tab of the Configuration Settings window. Now select the status name you want to make default and save this setting.