kouadri
jugend
Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition)
Paperback – 480 pages
ISBN-10: 0137012314
ISBN-13: 9780137012312
Product Description
The Best Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!TM--The World’s #1 Open Source Content Management System
If you want to build sophisticated websites that can be easily edited and updated, you need to master Joomla!. Now there’s an easy-to-read, easy-to-use guide to Joomla! for every site manager, administrator, and developer. Leading Joomla! consultant Barrie North covers all you need to get results: installation, administration, site organization, template development, content updates, and a whole lot more. You’ll find tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions, as well as three start-to-finish case studies.
New to Joomla!? No problem! This book starts with the simplest design and system concepts and builds your expertise step-by-step. You’ll rapidly master Joomla!’s power, even if you have no content management, scripting, or CSS expertise. Experienced with Joomla!? You’ll turn to this book constantly for its authoritative, plain-English, example-rich Joomla! 1.5 reference content.
- Understand content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together
- Build Joomla! sites from scratch and systematically customize them to your needs
- Organize content with sections, categories, blogs, and tables
- Create dynamic pages and effective navigation
- Work with Joomla! modules and components
- Learn how to optimize your Joomla! sites for search engines
- Follow three start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, a small business site, and a blog
- Identify the most valuable Joomla! extensions and add-ons: find them and use them
Barrie M. North has more than 15 years of experience with the Internet, as a user, designer, and teacher. A certified teacher, he has spent more than eight years in the education field, becoming steadily more involved in web technology and teaching technology integration to teachers. Most recently he worked as an IT consultant for two new schools pioneering in the use of technology. As well as web design, he has provided web marketing/SEO and usability and runs training classes for Joomla! across the United States. He is currently a partner of Joomlashack.com, providing templates and custom services. He also maintains a blog about all things Joomla! at compassdesigns.net. In 2008 he launched a new company, Simplweb, which provides turnkey Joomla! websites for small businesses, schools, and other industries. He has written many free tutorials for using Joomla! and is a frequent speaker at Joomla! events. His combination of Joomla! expertise, educational skills, and engaging writing produces books accessible to everyone.
About the Website
The accompanying site, www.joomlabook.com, provides five fully functional Joomla! sites with live follow-along examples from the book and up-to-date information on Joomla!.
Preface xxi
Acknowledgments xxix
About the Author xxxi
Chapter 1: Content Management Systems and an Introduction to Joomla! 1
What Is a Content Management System? 2
Static Web Pages 2
Web Pages with CSS 3
Dynamic Web Pages 4
Open Source Software 7
History of Joomla! 8
The Joomla! Community 9
Third-Party Extensions Development 9
Joomla!’s Features 9
Elements of a Joomla! Website 11
Content 13
Templates 14
Modules 15
Summary 15
Chapter 2: Downloading and Installing Joomla! 17
How to Install Joomla! 18
Obtaining the Latest Joomla! File Package 18
Joomla! Package Naming Conventions 19
Creating a MySQL Database 20
Unpacking the Joomla! Package 20
Unpacking Joomla! on a Local Desktop Computer 21
Unpacking Joomla! on a Hosting Account 24
Running the Joomla! Installation Wizard 26
Step 1: Language 26
Step 2: Pre-Installation Check 27
Step 3: License 27
Step 4: Database Configuration 28
Step 5: FTP Configuration 30
Step 6: Main Configuration 30
Step 7: Finish 32
Summary 33
Chapter 3: Joomla! Administration Basics 35
What Are the Frontend and Backend of a Joomla! Powered Website? 36
The Menu Bar 38
The Toolbar 39
The Workspace 39
Administrator Functions in the Menu Bar 40
The Site Submenu 40
The Menus Menu 48
The Content Menu 50
The Components Menu 52
The Extensions Menu 54
The Tools Menu 59
The Help Menu 60
Site Preview 60
Summary 62
Chapter 4: Content Is King: Organizing Your Content 63
How Does Joomla! Generate Web Pages? 64
How Joomla! Organizes Content Articles 66
Uncategorized Articles 66
Sections and Categories 67
A Sample Hierarchy 69
Creating the Widget Inc. Website with Uncategorized Content 70
Creating Content Articles 71
Creating Menu Items 75
The Front Page Component 81
Creating the Widget Inc. Website with Sections and Categories 85
Creating Sections 87
Creating Categories 88
Creating Content Articles 90
Creating Menu Items 92
“Read More” Links and Individual Page 99
Module Content 102
Summary 105
Chapter 5: Creating Menus and Navigation 107
How Menu Modules Work 108
What Menu Items Do 110
Creating a Menu Item 111
Where Does a Menu Item Link To? 113
What Does a Page Look Like After a Link Is Followed? 114
Blog Layout 116
Blog Layout Parameters 117
List Layout for a Section 122
Section List Layout Parameters 123
List Layout for a Blog 124
Category List Layout Parameters 124
Managing Menu Modules in the Module Manager 126
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Book Reviews
Before understanding what Joomla! is and giving my review on the current book, it is important to understand the evolution of webpage design and content.
A webpage is basically a set of two pieces: content + presentation. This simple combination has known several approaches in order to bring a resulting webpage to life.
First approach is to build static web pages that make use of HTML to include both the content and the way this content will appear in one single file.
Second approach relies on the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) where presentation of the webpage is separated from its content through the use of a css file that describes the layout, colours and effects to apply on the page content.
Finally, especially for professional websites, it is no longer sufficient to rely on the two previous approaches as there is a need to include dynamic content and presentation. The tool in rescue is CMS (Content Management System).
“Content management system software is usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). “ Wikipedia
Joomla! is a free open source content management system that includes features such as RSS feeds, page caching to improve performance, blogs, polls, website searching, calendar, forums and language internationalization. It is written in PHP language and relies on MySQL database system to store information.
In summary the main value of Joomla! is the ability to use templates and customise them to quickly produce a usable, nice looking website.
“Joomla! 1.5 A User’s guide” provides a step-by-step tutorial to build Joomla powered websites. The book contains twelve chapters. It begins with an introductory chapter to content management systems in general and Joomla! in particular, including its history and features. It is followed by a second chapter on downloading and installing Joomla! and a third one is dedicated to administration basics. Following chapters detail common tasks in organising content, menus and navigation, getting traffic to your website, and extending Joomla! Final chapters (10, 11 and 12) are dedicated to the presentation of three case studies: Creating a school website, a restaurant site and a blog.
The book content is logically organised and is suitable for first-time users. I recommend it as a must have guide following my painful experience in trying to build a Joomla! website from sparse guidelines found on the web. The book rather covers the most relevant information and covers the latest version of the system . However the reader should be aware that developer’s forums are also very useful when building a real website as it is impossible to covers all Joomla!’s features in a single book. (read less)
Before understanding what Joomla! is and giving my review on the current book, it is important to understand the evolution of webpage design and content.
A webpage is basically a set of two pieces: content + presentation. This simple combination has known several approaches in order to bring a resulting webpage to life.
First approach is to build static web pages that make use of HTML to include both the content and the way this content will appear in one single file.
Second approach relies on the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) where presentation of the webpage is separated from its content through the use of a css file that describes the layout, colours and effects to ap... (read more)
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