Joomla! 2.5 Beginner’s Guide

Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. Although it’s a fun and feature-rich tool, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that meets your needs perfectly. Using this book you can create dynamic, interactive web- sites that perfectly fit your needs.

Completely updated for Joomla! 2.5, this practical guide teaches you how to create professional, appealing and extendable websites, whether you want to create a full-featured company or club website or build a personal blog site.

The Joomla! Beginner’s Guide helps beginners to get started quickly and to get beyond the basics to take full advantage of Joomla!’s powerful features. Completely updated from the first book, real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, contemporary, feature-rich websites any developer can achieve with Joomla!. This book thoroughly covers the concepts behind the software and creates a coherent picture of how the software works. This book is not about what Joomla! can do – it’s about what you can do using Joomla!.

What you will learn from this book

• Create a feature-rich site that’s easy to expand, customize, and maintain without having to learn web languages such as HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Design attractive home pages that provide a quick overview of the site’s contents and direct people to the content they could be interested in
• Engage your web visitors and turn them into active users by enabling them to register, add content, and leave comments
• Design clear and easy navigation using menus, submenus, and text hyperlinks
• Make full use of templates to get your site to look just right, tweaking the CSS and customizing templates using your own logo, fonts, and colors
• Extend Joomla!’s capabilities by finding and utilizing must-have extensions that perfectly meet your needs
• Increase your site’s visibility for search engines by applying highly effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques
• Secure your site from hackers and potential threats using easy-to-follow techniques

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites
Chapter 2: Installation: Getting Joomla Up and Running
Chapter 3: First Step: Getting to Know Joomla
Chapter 4: Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour
Chapter 5: Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Effectively
Chapter 6: Creating Killer Content: Adding and Editing Articles
Chapter 7: Welcoming your Visitors: Creating Attractive Home Pages and Overview Pages
Chapter 8: Helping your Visitors Find What they Want: Managing Menus
Chapter 9: Opening up the Site: Enabling Users to Log in and Contribute
Chapter 10: Getting the Most out of your Site: Extending Joomla
Chapter 11: Creating an Attractive Design: Working with Templates
Chapter 12: Attracting Search Engine Traffic: Tips and Techniques
Appendix A: Keeping the Site Secure