Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5

In Detail

Joomla! started as a fork from Mambo in 2005, when many of the original developers of the Mambo CMS moved to working on Joomla! It has rapidly grown in popularity and, according to its own description, is a "Cutting Edge Content Management System and one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management systems in the world. It is used world-wide for anything from simple homepages to complicated corporate websites. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable."

While the Joomla! CMS has the flexibility and power needed for complex, full-featured web applications, it is also simple to use to create basic websites. Its powerful, extensible template system can deal many different data types and control of user access, approval of content, scheduling of content display, and rich administrative controls are all included.

This book takes a practical step-by-step approach of teaching the installation and configuration of Joomla! 1.5, customizing it, creating your templates and extensions, and finally, building your own website.

Read chapter 7: The Menus Menu [1.7 MB]

Book Reviews

Slashdot: "...from a technical perspective, the book offers a lot of valuable information to new Joomla developers, and could easily become the preferred resource that they turn to when building their first Joomla Web sites." - Michael J. Ross, Web Developer, Slashdot.org

The Open Sourcery: this book is great for getting developers well-launched into using Joomla! managers will find it more than approachable and can use the book to give a sounding on the types of projects and extensions they may want to take with Joomla. Finally, basic users will get a clear idea of what Joomla can do for them - and a good gauge for how easy (or taxing) various configurations and customizations are going to be. In short, this is a book not just for getting started but also fully utilizing Joomla - top marks to Hagen Graf and Packt Publishing for this book.

dyndns.biz: The book is very complete. It is a real beginning to end piece that has great instructional value. I can see it easily implemented in workshops etc. Up to chapter 13 not much knowledge is needed. Chapter 13 to 15 require some experience with php/html to be completely understandable.

Approach

This book takes the reader through the tasks essential to create a Joomla! website as rapidly as possible. The necessary tasks are explained with clear step-by-step instructions. The author's chatty and engaging style makes this book very readable.

Who this book is for

This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors, and marketing professionals who want to develop a website in a simple and straightforward process. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT-confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive website.