Product Description

The First Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!-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!-the world’s #1 open source content management system. 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 never-before-published 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! 1.0 and 1.5 reference content.

·   Understanding content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together

·   Building Joomla! sites from scratch, and systematically customizing them to your needs

·   Organizing content with sections, categories, blogs, and tables

·   Creating dynamic pages and effective navigation

·   Working with Joomla! modules and components

·   Search engine optimization for Joomla! sites

·   Start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, an e-commerce site, and a blog

·   The most valuable Joomla! extensions and add-ons: finding them, and using them

·   Key differences between Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5, and what they mean to you

About the Website

The accompanying site for the Joomla 1.5 book, provides five fully functional Joomla! sites with live follow-along examples from the book and up-to-date information on Joomla! The site also includes

• An active forum where you can ask questions specific to chapters from the book from a Joomla expert 
  
• 5 fully functional Joomla 1.5 live follow-along examples from the book. You can browse the sites and their backends live online.
• Downloads of 5 free websites for Joomla 1.5 based on various chapter of the book. These are SQL dumps you can import to instantly give you a completed Joomla site. 
  
• 4 free tutorial templates and 3 free templates from joomlashack.com including the popular commercial template - JS Aqualine!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #189999 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

From the Back Cover

The First Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!-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!-the world’s #1 open source content management system. 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 never-before-published 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! 1.0 and 1.5 reference content.

·   Understanding content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together

·   Building Joomla! sites from scratch, and systematically customizing them to your needs

·   Organizing content with sections, categories, blogs, and tables

·   Creating dynamic pages and effective navigation

·   Working with Joomla! modules and components

·   Search engine optimization for Joomla! sites

·   Start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, an e-commerce site, and a blog

·   The most valuable Joomla! extensions and add-ons: finding them, and using them

·   Key differences between Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5, and what they mean to you

About the Website

The accompanying site for the Joomla 1.5 book, provides five fully functional Joomla! sites with live follow-along examples from the book and up-to-date information on Joomla! The site also includes

• An active forum where you can ask questions specific to chapters from the book from a Joomla expert 
  
• 5 fully functional Joomla 1.5 live follow-along examples from the book. You can browse the sites and their backends live online.
• Downloads of 5 free websites for Joomla 1.5 based on various chapter of the book. These are SQL dumps you can import to instantly give you a completed Joomla site. 
  
• 4 free tutorial templates and 3 free templates from joomlashack.com including the popular commercial template - JS Aqualine!

About the Author

Barrie North has over 15 years of experience with the Internet, as a user, designer, and teacher. He has spent over eight years in the education fi eld, becoming steadily more involved in web technology and teaching web design classes to students and

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, usability, and standards compliance expertise to his clients.

He is a partner of Joomla!shack.com, providing templates and custom services. He also maintains a blog about all things Joomla! at compassdesigns.net. When not working, he can frequently be found on the Joomla! community boards, and he has written many free tutorials for using Joomla!. His combination of Joomla! expertise, educational skills, and engaging writing has produced a book accessible to everyone.

Customer Reviews

Great book for all
This book is ideal for complete beginners to CMS systems and web developers who want to focus on Joomla! but haven't used it much before. It'll certainly get you up to speed with Joomla! faster than clicking around forums that's for sure.

The first chapter or two cover some pretty basic stuff that would be very helpful to beginners, though most web designers/developers such as myself can skip it. That's not to say the book is of no use to developers. There is actually a lot of information in it, to quite a deep level, so for more experienced developers, it's a really handy book to dip into. It's easy to read, not too heavy going and written in plain english.

Good but could be better
I read the reviews and bought the book on the strength of them. It has certainly enabled me to make progress with a Joomla! powered website in a way that I would have found difficult from web documentation only.

Reservations:
1) the book has been poorly edited. It's not just that there are odd misplaced apostrophes and occasional sections where the meaning is clear but the words are jumbled. More seriously, in one place a "note that" has been presented as "not that", which makes the passage highly misleading. There are also errors in the sample code.
2) the mega-chapter on templates gives some very useful advice and some very subtle code examples. Helpfully, the code associated is freely downloadable under a "Creative Commons" licence. The example is great if you can work within the screen layout the author is using but if you want to change the header depth, for example, I could see no explanation of how to do this. In addition, the example text implies that to make Joomla! use some of the special features in the template, it is necessary to change settings in the normal Joomla! backend. OK, I found how to do this, but it would have been better if the example had shown which parameter to change.

In summary, this is a useful book for those who want to try setting up a Joomla! based web site. It will enable people to build useful sites based on standard templates. It gives some pointers into template design but don't expect to be able to design your own template without some knowledge of HTML, PHP and CSS. I hope there will be a second edition that fixes the editing problems and expands some of the explanations.

I can see Joomla! clearly now .....
I'm planning to build my first website. Content is King. I've done the due diligence bit, and decided that Joomla! is the one for me, but it seemed so complex.

Well that's no longer the case; Barrie Norman has produced an excellent guide to the brand new 1.5 version of Joomla! and having read it I feel entirely confident that I'll soon have a site up and running.

The book is very well produced, excellent quality, seems to cover all that you'll need to know and is well laid out. It's well written in that time-proven style; tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em; tell them; tell them what you've told them. The order of the chapters is logical and it is easy to follow through.

One of the hardest concepts to grasp is that of Sections, Categories, and Articles, but the author leads you through this in an easy 'building knowledge as you go' style which results in you ultimately gaining a full understanding of all the constituent parts and how thay fit together.

The example sites for a school, restaurant and blog site make for really useful case studies.

The interviews with existing owners of a variety of sites explaining why they chose Joomla!, what they like about it, what extra add-ons they are using, and relating their user experiences are also really useful.

There are also a couple of sections on that oh so vital black-art of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and it's great to get the heads-up on all these important tips & tricks before creating your website. It'll be so much simpler to get it right first time, and there's no point in building a site that nobody can find!

I am entirely confident that a few hours reading this book will pay back many-fold when it comes to actually developing my site.

I would recommend that anybody embarking on a Joomla! site build buys this book and reads it first.