Preface

Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. It's a free, fun, and feature-rich tool for anyone who wants to create dynamic, interactive websites. Even beginners can deploy Joomla! to build professional websites, although it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build the site that completely meets your needs. This book will help you to start building websites with Joomla! quickly and get the most out of its advanced features.

What this book covers

In Chapter 1: Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites, you'll learn why you want to use Joomla! to create an advanced, cool-looking site that's easy to expand, customize, and maintain.

In Chapter 2: Installation: Getting Joomla! Up and Running, you'll learn how to install Joomla! on your own computer or on a web server, and how to create a sample site.

In Chapter 3: First Steps: Getting to Know Joomla!, you'll get familiar with the basic concepts of Joomla!, the Joomla! interface, and the principles of a website constructed out of 'building blocks'.

In Chapter 4: Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour, you'll face a real-life challenge of using Joomla! to build a basic but expandable website fast. You'll customize Joomla!'s default sample site to fit your needs, adding content, menu links, and change the site's look and feel.

In Chapter 5: Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Effectively, you'll make it easy to add and find information on your site by designing a clear, expandable, and manageable structure for your content.

In Chapter 6: Creating Killer Content: Adding and Editing Articles, you'll learn to create content pages that are attractive and easy to read, and you'll learn about different ways to tweak the page layout.

In Chapter 7: Welcoming Your Visitors: Creating Attractive Home Pages and Overview Pages, you'll create a home page and overview pages to entice visitors to actually read all your valuable content.

In Chapter 8: Helping Your Visitors Find What They Want: Managing Menus, you'll learn how you can help the visitor to find what they want easily by designing clear and easy navigation through menus.

In Chapter 9: Opening Up the Site: Enabling Users to Contribute and Interact, you'll learn how to enable users to log in and allow them to create content and manage the website.

In Chapter 10: Getting the Most out of Your Site: Extending Joomla!, you'll learn how to extend Joomla!'s capabilities using all sorts of extensions—using an image gallery to attractively display pictures, automatically showing article teasers on the home page, or enhancing your workspace by installing an easier content editor.

In Chapter 11: Creating an Attractive Design: Working with Templates, you'll see how templates will give your site a fresh look and feel, and make it easy to create an individual look, different from a "typical" Joomla! site. You'll also learn to install and customize templates.

In Chapter 12: Attracting Search Engine Traffic: Tips and Techniques, you'll see how to increase your site's visibility for search engines by applying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, such as creating friendly URLs.

In Appendix A: Keeping the Site Secure, learn some simple, common sense steps you can take to keep your site safe from hackers or data loss.

What you need for this book

To follow the tutorials and exercises in this book, you'll need a computer with Internet access. It's recommended to have a web hosting account so that you can install Joomla! online.

Who this book is for

The Joomla! Beginner's Guide is aimed at anyone who wants to build and maintain a great website and get the most out of Joomla!. It helps you build on the skills and knowledge you may already have of creating websites—but if you're new to this subject, you won't have any difficulty understanding the instructions. Of course, we'll touch upon basic terms and concepts (such as HTML and CSS), but if you're not familiar with these, you'll also find references to some Web resources.

Conventions

In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.

To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:

Time for action—heading

  1. Action 1
  2. Action 2
  3. Action 3

Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:

What just happened?

This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.

You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:

Pop quiz - heading

These are short multiple choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.

Have a go hero—heading

These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.

You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "Change the width and height values to reflect the size of the new image. To shift the image a little to the left-hand side, decrease the margin-left value."

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes, for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on Save and click on Preview".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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