To access the cheat sheet specifically for this book, go to www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/joomla.

Find out "HOW" at Dummies.com

Introduction

Joomla (the exclamation point Joomla! won’t be used in the text of this book, for the sake of making it more readable,) gives you total control of your Web site — the layout, the navigation menus, the text, everything. In turn, 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?

Now you can. Content Management Systems (CMSes) like Joomla allow 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? Joomla’s got you covered. Interested in allowing people to log into your site to gain special privileges? You can do that too. Have you wanted 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? With Joomla, you can whip one up in no time at all. You’re going to find that not only is Joomla free but it’s also remarkably trouble free.

In the old days, you had to build your own site from scratch using HTML. Now, 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 of web publishing.

How This Book Is Organized

Joomla is a big topic. Here are the various parts you’re going to see coming up.

Part I: Getting Started with Joomla

In Part 1, you get a grasp for the basics. You’ll be given an overview of Joomla and see where 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, Part 1 illustrates how you can 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 the most basic of Web-site skills: creating your own pages and customizing them with text and images.

In this part, you also see how to work with menus. 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.

Foolish Assumptions

We don’t assume in this book that you have a lot of Web-site design experience. You don’t need to know any HTML or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) code to read and use this book.

We do assume that you have a Web site and that you can upload files to it, however. You’re going to need that skill to create a Joomla site, so if you’re unfamiliar with the process of uploading files to your Internet service provider, ask your provider’s tech staff for help.

That’s all you need, though. Joomla takes care of the rest.

Conventions Used in This Book

Some books have a dozen dizzying conventions that you need to know before you can even start. Not this one. All you need to know is that new terms are given in italics, like this, the first time they’re discussed.

Icons Used in This Book

You’ll find a few icons in this book, and here’s what they mean.

This icon marks an extra hint for more Joomla power.

This icon marks something you should remember to make sure you’re getting the most out of Joomla.

This icon means that what follows is technical, insider stuff. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to, but if you want to become a Joomla pro (and who doesn’t?), take a look.

This icon warns you of things to be super-careful about!

What You’re Not to Read

You don’t have to read some elements if you don’t want to — that is, Technical Stuff elements. Technical Stuff paragraphs give you a little more insight into what’s going on, but you can skip reading them if you want to. Your guided tour of the world of Joomla won’t suffer at all.

Where to Go from Here

You’re all set now, ready to jump into Chapter 1. You don’t have to start there, though; you can jump in anywhere you like. Joomla for Dummies is written to allow you to do just that. But if you want to get the full Joomla story from the beginning, start with Chapter 1, which is where all the action starts.

Please note that some special symbols used in this eBook may not display properly on all eReader devices. If you have trouble determining any symbol, please call Wiley Product Technical Support at 800-762-2974. Outside of the United States, please call 317-572-3993. You can also contact Wiley Product Technical Support at www.wiley.com/techsupport.

Part I

Getting Started with Joomla

In this part . . .

This part is where you begin putting Joomla to work. First, we give you an overview of Joomla as it’s used today around the world. Then we show you how to get and install Joomla.

Finally, we dig into Joomla by helping you master the home page of any Joomla site — that’s the front page, in Joomla lingo. You see how to add your own text to the front page, change the front page’s logo, sling the menu items around, and more.

Chapter 1

Essential Joomla

In This Chapter

Discovering Joomla

Viewing some example sites

Knowing what content management systems do

Finding out why Joomla is so popular

Preparing to use Joomla

The head Web designer walks into your sumptuous office and says, “We landed the MegaSuperDuperCo account.”

“That’s good,” you say.

“They want you to design their new Web site.”

“That’s good,” you say.

“They want to use a CMS.”

“That’s bad,” you say.

“What’s the problem?” the head Web designer asks.

You shift uncomfortably. “Well, I have no idea what a CMS is.”

The head Web designer laughs. “That’s no problem. It’s a content management system. You know — like Joomla.”

“Like whomla?” you ask.

The head Web designer tosses a folder on your desk. “Take a look at these sample sites. Joomla provides an easy framework for managing the content of your Web site. You type in the content, and Joomla takes care of displaying it for you.”

You pick up your cup of coffee as the head Web designer leaves and start leafing through the pages. Some of the Web sites are snazzy. Then you turn to your computer and start entering URLs. Welcome to Joomla!

What Joomla Can Do for You

Joomla is a content management system (CMS). Using a CMS means that after you set the site up, you (or your clients) are responsible only for entering text and figures. Joomla arranges the content, makes it searchable, displays it, and generally manages the site, so you need little or no technical expertise to create and operate it.

This isn’t to say that no skill is involved in putting a Joomla site together — far from it! But after you set up your Joomla site, daily maintenance and updates are a breeze, and can be as easy as copying and pasting content into Joomla’s Article Manager. With the click of a few options the stories are published — no fuss, no muss. Sounds pretty good, hmm?

Sample Joomla Sites

A great way to get to know Joomla is to take a look at what it’s capable of doing, which means taking a look at some Joomla-powered sites. The following sections introduce a few examples.

Oklahoma State University

First, check out the Oklahoma State University Web site at http://osu.okstate.edu/welcome/ (see Figure 1-1). The home page has a custom logo, a navigation bar of drop-down menus across the top, an eye-catching Flash-based photo gallery, an integrated Google search field, and a second bar of navigation options at the bottom.

The site is well balanced, giving the impression of professionalism, and it’s powered by Joomla, which is operating behind the scenes. You can’t tell just by looking that the content of the page — the text, photos, and menus — is actually stored in a database. Joomla handles all the details.

NZMac.com

Another Joomla-powered site is NZMac.com, which caters to the New Zealand Macintosh community, at www.nzmac.com (see Figure 1-2).

NZMac.com is another good site, featuring a top menu bar, opinion polls, a news blog, a section for off-site links, and even a products review section box. This site is also powered by Joomla, even though it looks different from the Oklahoma State University site. This difference is one of the strengths of Joomla: It’s easy to customize.

Royal Oak Public Library

Now take a look at www.ropl.org, the Royal Oak (Michigan) Public Library site (see Figure 1-3).

This site is well designed and easy to navigate, and boasts plenty of fresh content. Joomla excels at keeping site content up to date and makes the process easy.

Jenerate.com

Another good example is Jenerate.com at www.jenerate.com (see Figure 1-4).

All these Web sites look professional, and they also look different, yet they all use Joomla as their content management system. So just what is a CMS, and how does it work?

All about Content Management Systems

When the Web was young, static Web pages were all that anyone needed. These pages could be hand-coded in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) for display in a browser, like this:

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That kind of page served its purpose well for small sites. It gave people a Web presence and allowed them to display some images or maybe even add a little JavaScript to bring the page to life.

As the Web grew and pages got larger and larger, however, people discovered an inherent problem: They had to mix the HTML that handled the visual presentation in a browser with the data that was displayed. This mix made Web pages hard to maintain and update, because site owners were working with both text data and HTML.

Good: Web pages with CSS

To handle this issue, Web designers created Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS became primarily responsible for presenting the data in a Web page, although that page was still written in HTML, as follows:

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Now the presentation details were separated from the formal HTML structure of a page — tags such as <html>, <head>, and <body>. The actual content of the page, though, was still wrapped up in the HTML; site owners had to format the content by putting in the HTML tags. In other words, the addition of CSS removed the presentation details from the rest of the Web page but hadn’t yet separated the content from the HTML.

That situation was a problem for nontechnical people, who didn’t want to have to fit their text into HTML tags. After all, when someone writes a book report, he doesn’t have to worry about enclosing each paragraph in <p></p> elements or styling text with <div> or <span> class elements. That’s where CMSes came in.

Better: Dynamic Web pages via CMS

The whole idea of a CMS is to separate as much of the content as possible from the presentation details, which means that you don’t have to embed HTML tags in the content you want to display. The CMS does all that for you. You just have to write your Web site’s content, much as you would in a word processor. The CMS adds the CSS (from the Web-site templates you’ve decided on) and creates the actual HTML that goes to the browser, like this:

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In this scenario, you’re responsible for only the content of your Web site; the CMS handles all the presentation details. That’s the way things should be. Content should be king.

The upshot is that you end up writing what you want to say on your Web site and format it as you like, making text italic, large, small, or bold, just as you’d see in a word processor. The CMS takes what you write and displays it in a browser, using the Web-page templates you’ve selected and making hand-coded HTML and CSS obsolete.

Pretty cool, eh?

Reasons to Choose Joomla

The CMS of choice these days is Joomla. In 2010, Wikipedia listed 102 free and open-source CMSes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems). Joomla was the most popular of them in terms of number of installations. A Google search for “content management system,” also queried in 2010, returned Joomla first (following two generic Wikipedia articles), and a Google search for “Joomla” produced a mere 93.4 million hits, making this CMS more popular than apples (32.4 million hits) and oranges (12.8 million hits) put together.

What makes Joomla so popular? One reason is that it’s free — but you can find dozens of free CMSes. Another reason is that it’s been around for a long time — but dozens of other CMSes have been around for years as well. The following sections describe a few better reasons.

Loyal users

Joomla has a very loyal user base, with dedicated Joomla users around the world creating a strong community. That community in turn has created thousands of items to extend Joomla — templates, components, modules, plug-ins, and so on — just waiting for you to use. Finally, this thriving community specializes in providing help to novices, so when you use Joomla, you’re never alone.

Ease of use

Joomla is super-powerful, easy to use, and loaded with tons of extras (and even more tons of extras are available for download). Using Joomla makes creating a professional Web site nearly as easy as printing a word processing document.

Minimal learning curve

Although Joomla involves a small learning curve, after you master a few basic skills, building and maintaining a Web site is easy. The technical expertise you need is minimal compared with the requirements of other CMSes.

Other advantages

Here are some other advantages of Joomla:

Intuitive interface and management panel

What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editing

Rich formatting capabilities

Thousands of downloadable templates

Full text searches

Plug-ins for commercial sites, including complete shopping carts

Search-engine optimization features

Scheduled publishing

Where to Jump into Joomla

The main Joomla site is www.joomla.org (see Figure 1-5). This site is where you’ll get your copy of Joomla; it’s also your source for downloads and a great deal of help.

When you install Joomla, you see the default Web site shown in Figure 1-6, which is populated with all kinds of sample content.

Our job in this book is to help you understand and customize what you see in this figure so that you can create stunning Web sites.