Build and maintain impressive user-friendly web sites the fast and easy way with Joomla! 1.5

• Create a web site that meets real-life requirements by following the creation of an example site with the help of easy-to-follow steps and ample screenshots
• Practice all the Joomla! skills from organizing your content to completely changing the site's looks and feel
• Go beyond a typical Joomla! site to make the site meet your specific needs
• Get to grips with inspiring examples and best practices and implement them to enhance your Joomla! site

In Detail

Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. Although it's a fun and feature-rich tool, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that meets your needs perfectly. Using this book you can create dynamic, interactive web sites that perfectly fit your needs.

This practical guide gives you a head start in using Joomla! 1.5, helping you to create professional and good-looking web sites, whether you want to create a full-featured company or club web site or build a personal blog site.

The Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide helps beginners to get started quickly and to get beyond the basics to take full advantage of Joomla!'s powerful features. Real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, contemporary, feature-rich web sites any developer can achieve with Joomla!. It gives you a head start and explains what's good and useful about Joomla! features and what's not. The focus is on clear instructions and easy-to-understand tutorials, with minimum of jargon. This book provides clear definitions, thoroughly covering the concepts behind the software and creating a coherent picture of how the software works. This book is not about what Joomla! can do--it's about what you can do using Joomla!.

What you will learn from this book

• Create a feature-rich site that's easy to expand, customize, and maintain without having to learn web languages such as HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Design attractive home pages that provide a quick overview of the site's contents and direct people to the content they could be interested in
• Engage your web visitors and turn them into active users by enabling them to register, add content, and leave comments
• Design clear and easy navigation using menus, submenus, and text hyperlinks
• Make full use of templates to get your site to look just right, tweaking the CSS and customizing templates using your own logo, fonts, and colors
• Extend Joomla!'s capabilities by finding and utilizing must-have extensions that perfectly meet your needs
• Increase your site's visibility for search engines by applying highly effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques
• Secure your site from hackers and potential threats using easy-to-follow techniques

Chapter 1: Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Your Web Site - In this chapter you'll learn why you'd want to use Joomla!: to create a cool looking, feature-rich site that's easy to expand, customize, and maintain.

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 install a sample site.

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

Chapter 4: Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour - Face a Real-Life Challenge - In this chapter you'll use Joomla! to build a basic but expandable web site fast - customizing Joomla! 's default sample site to fit your needs, adding content, menu links, and changing the site's look and feel.

Chapter 5: Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing Your Content Effectively -Making it easy to add and find information on your site: designing a clear, expandable, manageable structure for your content.

Chapter 6: Creating Killer Content: Adding and Editing Articles -In this chapter, 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.

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

Chapter 8: Helping Your Visitors Find What They Want: Managing Menus -In this chapter, you'll practice designing clear and easy navigation through menus. How can you help the visitors to find what they want easily?

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 web site. Enable visitors to register and give them exclusive access to premium content. Another powerful way to get visitors involved is to allow them to leave comments.

Chapter 10: Getting the Most out of Your Site: Extending Joomla! -In this chapter, 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.

Chapter 11: Creating an Attractive Design: Working with Templates -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 learn how to install and customize templates.

Chapter 12: Attracting Search Engine Traffic -This chapter shows you how to increase your site's visibility for search engines applying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, such as creating friendly URLs.

Appendix - Keeping the Site Secure -In this chapter you'll learn simple, common sense steps you can take to keep your site safe from hackers.

Approach

Written with a fast-paced but friendly and engaging approach, this Packt Beginner's guide is designed to be placed alongside the computer as your guide and mentor to meet real-world web building challenges. Step-by-step tutorials are bolstered by explanations of the reasoning behind what you are doing. You will quickly pick up the necessary skills, tips, and tricks for building a successful Joomla! web site with practical examples that help you to learn by experiment and play.

Who this book is written for

If you want to build and maintain your own web site, the Joomla! Beginner's Guide is perfect for you. It helps you build on the skills and knowledge you may already have on creating web sites- but even if you're new to this subject, you won't have any difficulty understanding the clear and friendly instructions and explanations. You learn how to build and maintain web sites without having to dive deep into HTML and CSS.