Building Websites With Joomla!: A step by step tutorial to getting your Joomla! CMS website up fast This book is a fast paced tutorial to creating a website using Joomla!. If you’ve never used Joomla!, or even any web content management system before, then this book will walk you through each step in a friendly and accessible way. From installation, to initial set up and content entry and then on to customization for your own look and feel, this book will get you to a stable and working Joomla! based web site fast. You don’t have to be an experienced web developer or designer to get a great looking site with a full set of functions using this book and Joomla! This book will guide through every step.
Joomla! is a fully featured web content management system and was created in Summer 2005 as a fork from the hugely popular Mambo CMS with many of the original Mambo developers moving their efforts to Joomla! While still in its first release, it is supported by an active and well organized open source development team and community. Joomla! is both easy to use at the entry level for creating basic websites, whilst having the power and flexibility to support complex web applications. Joomla! implements the core requirements of a full-featured CMS. It has a powerful and extensible templating system with the ability to upload and manage many different data types. User access control, content approval, rich administrative control, and content display scheduling are all built-in. New features and extensions are constantly added to the core system, with many more being available and supported by the community.
The book begins by introducing Joomla! and concepts behind content management. Then the installation of Joomla!, and its supporting software [Apache/MySQL/PHP] is covered clearly and simply. Once you have the installation up and running, we then take a tour of Joomla! as it appears out of the box, to familiarize ourselves with how it works and what is what. As you take the tour, your own ideas for what you need in your new website begin to crystallize around what you can see Joomla! is capable of. We then build our web application, using only the features of Joomla! we really need. Once we have a base version of our site up, we then learn how to change its appearance and feature set to suit our particular requirements, including bringing it into line with an established corporate identity. At the end of the book we show how you can add your own extensions to Joomla!.
This book focuses on taking you through the essential tasks to create a Joomla! site as fast as possible. These essential tasks are explained clearly, with well structured step-by-step instructions. The book does not aim to cover every feature of Joomla! nor is it a comprehensive guide to extending Joomla!. Almost everything in the book is accomplished without recourse to the underlying PHP code in which Joomla! is written. The book is very readable and the author has a particularly chatty and engaging writing style.
Customer Review: worth the money
This book is worth the $40+ dollars I paid for it b/c I believe it will save me time messing when compared with the rather frustrating online documentation for Joomla!
The text is an introductory one and focused primarily on NON-PROGRAMMERS. It reads much like the manual that should be in the Joomla! online documentation, but isn’t yet. It is true that you can muddle through the Joomla! program and get most things figured out, but this book will help you do it quicker.
What it will be really good for is to loan it to clients I’ve installed Joomla! for so they can quickly get up to speed on what most things do. There are so many options in Joomla! it can be overwhelming at first and this guide helps break it down into bite sized pieces.
What it isn’t, and I sooo wish it was, is a particularly effective guide on how to program components, modules, and mambots. It can be done from the information provided but I like to understand every little thing before I start programming and that is not the case here. It is after all an introductory text.
The spelling errors and language issues mentioned in another post are isolated to the Preface, Chapter 1, & Chapter 3. Page 2 has fro instead of for. Chapter 1 pages 16 & 17 show some example sites in German & Norwegian, however the language is unimportant since it’s the style I was concerned with. Page 50 mentions a tutorial in German, not real useful, however since I understand how to work a search engine I’m pretty sure I can find the htaccess information I need.
I would definitely buy a intermediate/advanced version of this book. There is an Apress book coming out in August about Joomla! I hope that will fulfill that product niche. I also really like that the publisher donates a portion of the proceeds back to Joomla!
I actually scanned chapters 7-9 & the appendix and carefully read the rest of the book. Chapter’s 7,8,9, & the appendix didn’t deal with topics I need to know at this time.
I hope this was helpful
Robert Speer
www.robertspeer.com
Customer Review: Not even close to being a “step by step tutorial”
Don’t bother with this book. Most, if not all, of the information is readily available on the Joomla! website and goes no further in explaining things than the Joomla! website does. What few items it brings up, it only brings up in very little detail; often referencing websites that aren’t available in multiple languages (often only in German).
Ironically, the section dealing with clear content and writing clearly is riddled with spelling, content and grammatical errors. More or less sums up the rest of the book.