Product Description

Joomla! is one of the fastest growing Open Source Content Management Systems on the market today and has won multiple awards since it's release in 2005. Currently, Joomla! has the largest 3rd party developer and designer community, with over 160,000 current registered users, over 2,000 templates, and 3,000 extensions. This task-based guide to creating, customizing, and maintaining a dynamic Joomla! 1.5 web site starts with the fundamental concepts and advantages of a Content Management System and then walks the user through setting up a server environment, downloading and installing Joomla!, adding and structuring content, using components, modules, and plugins, and administrating from both the back and front-ends. The book finishes with more advanced topics, including CSS, search engine optimization (SEO), and customizing templates and the Joomla! framework itself. It's the perfect guide to getting started with Joomla or for those users that want to expand their skills.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15320 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

From the Back Cover
Joomla! is one of the fastest growing Open Source Content Management Systems on the market today and has won multiple awards since it's release in 2005. Currently, Joomla! has the largest 3rd party developer and designer community, with over 160,000 current registered users, over 2,000 templates, and 3,000 extensions. This task-based guide to creating, customizing, and maintaining a dynamic Joomla! 1.5 web site starts with the fundamental concepts and advantages of a Content Management System and then walks the user through setting up a server environment, downloading and installing Joomla!, adding and structuring content, using components, modules, and plugins, and administrating from both the back and front-ends. The book finishes with more advanced topics, including CSS, search engine optimization (SEO), and customizing templates and the Joomla! framework itself. It's the perfect guide to getting started with Joomla or for those users that want to expand their skills.

Customer Reviews

Great book for the novice Joomla user, from install to customisation
After a brief experiment several years ago, I decided to give Joomla another try, this book makes navigating the 'backend' of Joomla much easier and helps you get an understanding of how Joomla sites are put together.

With most other methods of website creation I've found it difficult to add extra features such as forums and ecommerce and keep everything seamless for the website visitor, Joomla has so many free extensions and add-ons that you really can make ANY type of site.

This book has images of the control panel interface which makes it much easier to understand what needs to be done to acheive the desired result, although most, if not all the information in the book could be discovered by searching the net, it's so much quicker and easier to have the book to hand for whenever you get confused!

Within minutes of getting this book I had flipped through it to scan for anything particuarly useful for me and a couple of really useful pieces of information popped out at me, firstly a free 'bridge' that enables a phpbb forum to be easily integrated into a Joomla installation, and secondly, I found links to help me use Dreamweaver to edit Joomla templates.

I still find it hard to believe that Joomla is free! and this book makes the installation, configuration and expansion of a Joomla website really easy.

I highly recommend this book for anyone considering creating a Joomla powered site, it's a small price to pay, especially considering everything else you need to create a powerful attractive website is free, well except maybe the domain and hosting! I just which I'd stuck with Joomla and found this book years ago.

Nicely laid out, but some important flaws...
This is certainly a well presented book, written in plain English with clear step by step instructions on getting started with Joomla. However, the instructions for installing a local server for Windows are incorrect - the authors state that you MUST enable Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows. This is simply untrue, it's possible to use Apache/MySQL and PHP (through WAMP or XAMPP) instead of IIS but worse, the latest Joomla versions (Feb 2009) actually won't install in IIS! Many wasted hours trying to fix IIS, search forums etc... Shame really because the rest of the book is highly recommended.

Does what it says on the tin
The clue is in the title - it is a Quick Start Guide. I have used these books before and they are aimed at getting you going quickly. This title certainly does that. CMS systems have a lot in common, but it is all their little idiosyncrasies that can lose you. This book quickly shoots you through that and gets you up and running. I was able to use it to get my first Joomla site up... but that was all. I learned a lot through the process and site two is far more successful. There are some items and bits of information that come towards the end of the book that would have been useful much earlier. Each chapter is summarised with a very useful table that you can use as on-going reference.
As a Quick Start this book is great - but now I need a more detailed manual to really get the most out of Joomla.