Joomla! 3 Beginner’s Guide

A clear, hands-on guide to creating perfect content managed websites with the free Joomla! CMS

Overview

• Create a Joomla! website in an hour with the help of easy-to-follow steps and screenshots.
• Build and maintain your own website quickly, easily and efficiently, getting the most out of the latest release of the Joomla! content management system.
• Go beyond a typical Joomla! site to make a website meet your specific needs.
• Learn by doing: follow step-by-step instructions on how to design, secure, administrate, and fill your site with content
• Update to the popular “Joomla! 2.5 Beginner’s Guide” by Eric Tiggeler

In Detail

Joomla! is one of the most popular open source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. It’s a free, fun, and feature-rich tool for anyone who wants to create dynamic, interactive websites. Even beginners can deploy Joomla to build professional websites. Even though it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build the site that meets your needs perfectly, this book will guide you through it all.

Completely updated for Joomla! 3, this practical guide helps you to create professional and good-looking websites with Joomla!, whether you want to build a personal blog site or a full-featured company or club website.

The Joomla! 3 Beginner’s Guide will help you to get started with Joomla! quickly. It’s presented in an organized, easy-to-read manner. The book doesn’t focus on what Joomla! can do – it focuses on what you can do using Joomla!.

You learn how to get Joomla! up and running, how to organize content, add new menus, add new features, change the design and much more. Real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, feature-rich websites any web builder can achieve with Joomla!. The focus is on clear instructions and easy-to-understand tutorials, with minimal jargon.

Using the “Joomla! 3 Beginner’s Guide” you’ll quickly gain the knowledge needed to build your own site, perfectly tailored to your specific needs

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 looking 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 Steps – 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: SEO Tips and Techniques
Appendix A: Keeping the Site Secure
Appendix B: Creating a Multilingual Site
Appendix C: Pop Quiz Answers