Joomla For Dummies
Joomla (we’re dropping the final exclamation point from Joomla! in the text of this book, following the convention in other books and making this book more readable) gives you total control of your Web site — the layout, the navigation menus, the text, everything. And this book gives you total control of Joomla. Today, users are demanding more from Web sites. It’s not enough to have static text on your Web site — not if you want a steady stream of visitors. You’ve got to update your pages continually, making your site fresh and keeping it new. You’ve got to have an attractively, professionally formatted site. You’ve got to have tons of extras: polls and e-mail signups and newsflashes and menus, and more. Who can afford the time to maintain a site like that and write the content too?
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Now you can. Content management systems (CMSes) like Joomla are coming to the rescue, letting people put together spectacular sites with very little work. Want to publish a new article on your site? No problem. Want to let users rate your articles with a clickable bar of stars? Also no problem. Want to link your articles with a cool system of drop-down menus? No trouble. Want to let people log into your site to gain special privileges? No worries. Want to let users search every page on your site? Yep — no problem at all. CMSes are all the rage on the Internet these days: They give you the complete framework of a Web site and allow you to manage it professionally with a few clicks. All you have to do is provide the content — such as text, images, and videos — that you want to display. Using a CMS is as easy as typing in a word processor (in fact, one way to think of CMSes is as word processors for the Web) but a lot more fun. The CMS of choice these days is Joomla, which is what this book is all about. Joomla is free and dramatically powerful. Want a site that looks as though a Fortune 500 company is behind it? Coming right up in just a few minutes. [ad code=3 align=center]
You’re going to find that Joomla is not only free but also remarkably trouble free. In the old days, you had to build your own site from scratch using HTML. These days, Joomla takes care of all the details for you, allowing you to concentrate on the content of your site instead of struggling with the details of how that content is presented. Welcome to the new era.
Steven Holzner, PhD
Nancy Conner, PhD
Learn to:
• Create interactive Web sites with Joomla!
• Choose the correct modules, components, and plug-ins
• Include discussions, polls, RSS feeds, and more
• Develop sites with optimum search engine visibility
How This Book Is Organized
Joomla is a big topic because Web-site possibilities are endless. Here are the various parts you’re going to see coming up.
Part I: Getting Started with Joomla
This part is where you get your start with Joomla. We give you an overview of Joomla as it’s been put to work in Web sites both nationally and internationally. You also see how to get Joomla (for free) and install it. This process can take a little doing, so Chapter 2 is devoted to the topic. Finally, we show you how to jump right into Joomla, customizing the home
page (called the front page on Joomla sites) by installing your own logo, adding text, modifying navigation menus, and more.
Part II: Joomla at Work
This part gives you the skills you need to put Joomla to work every day. We start this part with a chapter on those most basic Web-site skills: creating your own pages and customizing them with text and images, laying out their content as you want.
In this part, you also see how to work with menus, because menu items are very powerful in Joomla. Believe it or not, a Web page can’t even exist on a Joomla site unless a menu item points to it — and menu items actually determine the layout of the Web pages they point to.
Part III: Working with Joomla
Modules and Templates Joomla comes packed with dozens of built-in modules that give you extraordinary power. These modules include search, polls, menus, newsflashes, and banners. This part is where you see how to use all the modules that
come with Joomla. Part III also looks at how to work with Joomla templates. Templates create the actual layout of your pages: what goes where, how modules are positioned, where the page content is displayed, what images and color schemes are used, and more. Although Joomla comes with only a few templates, thousands more are available on the Internet.
Part IV: Joomla in the Real World
This part takes you into the real world, dealing with real people. Joomla supports eight levels of users, and in this part, we show you how to manage them. We also take a look at how to get users to come to your site through search engine optimization — the process of making your site friendly to search engines to get a high ranking. This topic is a big one in Joomla. Finally, we discuss how to extend Joomla with extensions. Although the software is very powerful out of the box, thousands of extensions are just waiting to be installed — everything from games to complete shopping-cart
systems, from site-map generators to multilingual content managers.
Part V: The Part of Tens
In Part V, we list ten top Joomla extensions, ten places to get Joomla help
online, ten top sources of Joomla templates, and ten places to find Joomla
tutorials.
Introduction ………………………………………………………. 1
Part I: Getting Started with Joomla …………………………. 5
Chapter 1: Essential Joomla …………………………………………………………………………………7
Chapter 2: Getting and Installing Joomla …………………………………………………………….17
Chapter 3: Mastering the Front Page …………………………………………………………………..45
Part II: Joomla at Work ………………………………………. 81
Chapter 4: Adding Web Pages to Your Site …………………………………………………………83
Chapter 5: Building Navigation into Your Site with Menus ………………………………..123
Chapter 6: Mastering Web Page Creation ………………………………………………………….147
Part III: Working with Joomla Modules
and Templates ………………………………………………… 179
Chapter 7: Fun with Modules: Advertisements, Archives,
Banners, Custom HTML, and More …………………………………………………………………181
Chapter 8: More Fun with Modules: Footers, Search Boxes,
Who’s Online, Wrappers, and More ………………………………………………………………..199
Chapter 9: Laying Out Your Web Pages with Joomla Templates ……………………….215
Part IV: Joomla in the Real World ……………………….. 231
Chapter 10: Managing Your Web Site’s Users ……………………………………………………233
Chapter 11: Driving Traffi c to Your Web Site with Search Engine Optimization …249
Chapter 12: Extending Joomla …………………………………………………………………………..263
Part V: The Part of Tens ……………………………………. 281
Chapter 13: Ten Top Joomla Extensions …………………………………………………………..283
Chapter 14: Ten Ways to Get Help on Joomla ……………………………………………………291
Chapter 15: Ten Top Joomla Template Sites……………………………………………………..295
Chapter 16: Ten Joomla Tutorials …………………………………………………………………….305
Glossary ………………………………………………………… 315
Index ……………………………………………………………. 319
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