Product Description

The Best Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!TM--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. 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 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! 1.5 reference content.

• Understand content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together
• Build Joomla! sites from scratch and systematically customize them to your needs
• Organize content with sections, categories, blogs, and tables
• Create dynamic pages and effective navigation
• Work with Joomla! modules and components
• Learn how to optimize your Joomla! sites for search engines
• Follow three start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, a small business site, and a blog
• Identify the most valuable Joomla! extensions and add-ons: find them and use them

About the Website

The accompanying site, www.joomlabook.com, provides five fully functional Joomla! sites with live follow-along examples from the book and up-to-date information on Joomla!.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13569 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

From the Back Cover

The Best 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! 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 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! 1.5 reference content.

• Understand content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together
• Build Joomla! sites from scratch and systematically customizing them to your needs
• Organize content with sections, categories, blogs, and tables
• Create dynamic pages and effective navigation
• Work with Joomla! modules and components
• Search engine optimization for Joomla! sites
• Start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, an small business site, and a blog
• The most valuable Joomla! extensions and add-ons: finding them, and using them

About the Website

The accompanying site, www.joomlabook.com, provides five fully functional Joomla! sites with live follow-along examples from the book and up-to-date information on Joomla!

Chapter 1: Content Management Systems and an Introduction to Joomla!

Chapter 2: Downloading and Installing Joomla!

Chapter 3: Joomla! Administration Basics

Chapter 4: Content Is King--Organizing Your Content

Chapter 5: Creating Menus and Navigation

Chapter 6: Extending Joomla!

Chapter 7: Expanding Your Content: Articles and Editors

Chapter 8: Getting Traffic to Your Site

Chapter 9: Creating a Pure CSS Template

Chapter 10: Creating a School site with Joomla!

Chapter 11: Creating a Restaurant Site with Joomla!

Chapter 12: Creating a Blog Site with Joomla!

Appendix A: Getting Help

Appendix B: Joomla! Case Studies

Appendix C: A Quick Start to SEO

Appendix D: Install WAMP5

About the Author

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. 

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.

A good book, abandoned - but not for long!
What a pity - this is an excellent first book on Joomla 1.5 - probably the best but now it has been relegated to nothing but a course in frustration. The book [not unreasonably] is based on Joomla 1.5. Since then Joomla progressed through 1.5.1, 1.5.2 to 1.5.3 [at the time of writing]. Sadly 1.5.2 was quite a big update and changed many Joomla admin menus etc. making the book quite out of step to a current downloaded copy of Joomla.

But here comes the tragedy. The once active forum has virtually fallen into disuse - checkout the posting frequency and dates. The author seems to have fled from cyperspace and his recent responses are notable by their absence. A suggestion that it would be useful to find a source of Joomla 1.5.0 installation has gone unheeded for a week and even a request to the author to know if in fact it is that version that was originally used.

I think we all appreciate it can take at least six months to get into print. Meanwhile a rugged growing youngster like Joomla will have a degree of metamorphosis but not to have recourse to forum support is a distinct disadvantage. The book merits five stars - if the Joomla version it was based on was available. Whilst it isn't one wonders if one should buy it at all. Only you, dear reader, can decide. If you do, get a few Sherlock Holmes primers in the same order is my tip.

Update: 31/05/2008 - after a short[ish] delay of a week, the forum finally got a lead from the author on where to get a copy of the 1.5.0 [book] version of Joomla. This makes all the difference - thank you. However, the author then appears to use registrations on the forum to promote other books and services by email. Is this SPAM or just agressive marketing? You decide.