Joomla! 1.6: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website

The world's best-selling Joomla! book, now fully updated to cover Joomla! 1.55- Covers everything users need to know to build Joomla! sites from scratch - and customize them to their specific requirements.- Includes complete case studies, extensive code samples, and detailed coverage of today's best Joomla! extensions and add-ons- By Barrie North, a high-profile author and leading Joomla! consultant who is well known for his speaking and training engagements. Millions of individuals and organizations want to build sophisticated Web sites that can be easily edited and updated. The best tool for doing so is Joomla! -- the world's #1 open source content management system. Easy to read, and easy to use, this book is packed with real-world scenarios, examples, and code - all fully updated for the newest release, Joomla! 1.5.5. Leading Joomla! consultant Barrie North covers everything readers need to get results: installation, administration, site organization, template development, content updates, and a whole lot more. Writing in plain English, North starts by demystifying content management and introducing Joomla!'s simplest design and system concepts. Next, North builds readers' expertise step-by-step, showing how to build and customize Joomla! sites from scratch. Topics covered include: content organization, dynamic pages, navigation, modules and components, optimizing Joomla! sites for search engines, and a whole lot more. Throughout, North offers expert tips and tricks that can be used by anyone, including Joomla! novices. He presents never-before-published tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions, as well as three start-to-finish case studies. Readers will also learn where to find the best and newest Joomla! extensions - so they can accomplish even more with Joomla!, without writing original code.

Barrie North has more than 15 years of experience with the Internet, as a user, designer, and teacher. He has spent more than 8 years in the education field, becoming steadily more involved in web technology and teaching web design classes to students 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 he runs training classes for Joomla! across the United States.

 

In 2008 he launched a new company, Simplweb.com, which provides turnkey Joomla! websites for small business, 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 has produced books accessible to everyone. 

Preface PrefaceJoomla! is an open source content management system (CMS) that anyone can download for free (see http://forge.joomla.org/sf/go/projects.joomla/frs ). This makes it an ideal choice for small businesses. Don't let the price tag fool you, though; Joomla! is powerful and robust, and more big organizations are choosing to use open source software solutions all the time. Its universal appeal has made Joomla! hugely popular as a CMS.As Joomla! matures, it is being adopted by more and more organizations, from corporations to schools and universities to government organizations to newspapers and magazines to small businesses. Its greatest advantage is its flexibility. You can see it on a huge variety of sites. The Purpose of This BookThis book is about Joomla!, a popular and award-winning ("Best Linux/Open Source Project" for 2005) open source CMS. This book walks, step-by-step, through everything you need to develop a successful website powered by Joomla!. The book gives a general overview of management of a CMS and teaches you key concepts regarding content organization, editing, and templates. Finally, this book examines some more general topics, such as how to maximize search engine optimization (SEO) with Joomla! and what resources are available in the Joomla! web community.This book focuses on the most current release of Joomla!, Joomla! 1.5, which is a significant update to this CMS. This Book's Target AudienceThis book primarily targets people using Joomla! 1.5 to create a website, either for themselves or their clients. It's easy to read and low on technical jargon. It doesn't assume that you know PHP or CSS.All the concepts in this book are explained with step-by-step contextual examples. If you follow all the steps in all the chapters, you will build seven separate Joomla! websites! How to Use This BookYou can use this book in several ways. You can start at the beginning and go chapter-by-chapter, as you develop your own site. The book is carefully laid out so that introductory ideas in the earlier chapters are developed and built on to help you understand more advanced concepts later on. You can also use the book as a reference. If you need some quick ideas of what newsletter extensions are available, for example, head to Chapter 6, "Extending Joomla!" Finally, the appendixes contain valuable information about various aspects of Joomla!. Chapter 1: Content Management Systems and an Introduction to Joomla!In today's fast-moving web, if you have a website that doesn't have rich functionality or fresh content, you will find yourself at a disadvantage to those who do. The idea of powering websites with a CMS has been around for some time, but it is only recently with the advent of high quality open source CMS scripts like Joomla! that we have seen these powerful CMS tools coming into our hands.In this chapter, I explain in detail the difference between a "traditional" website and one using a CMS. We also look at the history of Joomla! and an overview of some of its features. Chapter 2: Downloading and Installing Joomla!Joomla! is one of the most popular open source CMS on the planet. The first step in becoming part of the "Joomla!sphere," the vibrant community that exists around the Joomla! Project, is to download Joomla! and install it on your web server.This ch