chapter no.1 a new and easy way to build websites

Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide Second Edition

Eric Tiggeler

Chapter No.1

"A New and Easy Way to Build Websites"

In this package, you will find: The author’s biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter no.1 "A New and Easy Way to

Build Websites"

A synopsis of the book’s content

Information on where to buy this book

About the Author Eric Tiggeler has authored several books on Joomla!, such as the highly successful

Joomla! 2.5 Beginner's Guide and Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide, both by Packt

Publishing. He has also written several Joomla! guides in Dutch. His books have received

excellent reader reviews. He also writes tutorials for several computer magazines and

Joomla! community websites. Over the last ten years, he has developed numerous

websites, big and small, using Joomla!.

He is fascinated by the Web as a powerful, creative, and ever-changing means of

communication, as well as by the revolutionary software Joomla!, which enables

anybody to create beautiful and user-friendly websites.

On a daily basis, he works as a consultant and copywriter at a communication

consultancy company affiliated to the Free University of Amsterdam. Over the last few

years, he has written more than 20 books in Dutch on writing and communication. His

passion lies in making complex things easy to understand.

He is married, has two daughters, and lives and works in Hilversum, the Netherlands. On

the Web, you'll find him at (in Dutch) and

(in English).

Any book is a team effort, so I would like to thank everyone at Packt

Publishing for their encouraging commitment to this project. I also

wish to thank the reviewers for testing the alpha version of this book

and helping me create a thoroughly reliable final release!

For More Information: www.packtpub.com/joomla-3-5-beginners-guide/book

http://www.packtpub.com/joomla-3-5-beginners-guide/book

Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide Second Edition Joomla! is one of the most popular open source content management systems, and it is

actively developed and supported by a worldwide 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, although it can be

challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that completely meets your needs.

This book will help you to start building websites with Joomla! quickly, and also help

you learn step-by-step to get the most out of its advanced features.

What This Book Covers Chapter 1, A New and Easy Way to Build Websites, will help you learn why you want to

use Joomla! to create an advanced, cool-looking site that's easy to expand, customize,

and maintain.

Chapter 2, Getting Joomla! Up and Running, will show you how to install Joomla! on

your own computer or on a web server and how to create a sample site.

Chapter 3, First Steps – Getting to Know Joomla!, will familiarize you with the basic

concepts of Joomla!, the administrative interface, and the principles of a website

constructed out of building blocks.

Chapter 4, Web Building Basics – Creating a Site in an Hour, will make you face a real-

life challenge of using Joomla! to build a basic but expandable website in less time.

You'll customize a default sample site of Joomla! to fit your needs, adding content and

menu links and changing the site's look and feel.

Chapter 5, Small Sites, Big Sites – Organizing Your Content Effectively, will help you

design a clear, expandable, and manageable framework for your content. Using a

structure of categories and tags, you will make it easy for the users to add and find

information on your site.

Chapter 6, Creating Killer Content – Adding and Editing Articles, will help you to create

attractive content pages, and you'll learn about different ways to add images and tweak

the page layout.

Chapter 7, Welcoming Your Visitors – Creating Attractive Home Pages and Overview

Pages, shows you how to create a home page and overview pages to entice visitors to

actually read all your valuable content.



Chapter 8, Helping Your Visitors Find What They Want – Managing Menus, will discuss

how you can help visitors to find what they want by designing clear and straight forward

navigation through menus.

Chapter 9, Opening Up the Site – Enabling Users to Log in and Contribute, will show

you how to enable users to log in and allow them to create content and manage a website.

Chapter 10, Getting the Most out of Your Site – Extending Joomla!, will explain how to

extend the capabilities of Joomla! using all sorts of extensions, such as using an image

gallery to display pictures attractively, automatically showing article teasers on the home

page, or enhancing your workspace by installing a more powerful content editor.

Chapter 11, Creating an Attractive Design – Working with Templates, will show you

how templates can give your site a fresh look and feel and how you can customize

templates to create an individual look, different from a typical Joomla! site.

Chapter 12, Attracting Search Engine Traffic – SEO Tips and Techniques, will show you

how to increase your site's visibility for search engines by applying Search Engine

Optimization (SEO) techniques, such as creating friendly URLs.

Appendix A, Keeping the Site Secure, will explore some simple, logical steps you can take

to safeguard your site from hackers or data loss.

Appendix B, Creating a Multilingual Site, will walk you through the series of steps

involved in creating a bilingual website using the multilingual capabilities built

in Joomla!.

Appendix C, Pop Quiz Answers, contains answers to the multiple choice pop quizzes you

will find throughout the book.



1A New and Easy Way to

Build Websites

You want to build a website. It should look great, it should be easy to use and maintain, and keeping it up-to-date should be effortless. Changing the appearance of your site should take minutes, not hours. You don't want to manage it all by yourself, but you want to enable other people to log in and write new content without having to understand HTML or other coding languages. Also, when your site grows, it should be easy to extend it with new functionality—maybe adding a forum, or a newsletter. If that's what you're looking for, welcome to Joomla!.

When it comes to crea ng a great, professional-looking website that's straigh orward to use, you really can't beat the power of a content management system (CMS) such as Joomla. Without wri ng a single line of code, you can create any kind of site that boasts a variety of cool and advanced features.

Join the CMS revolutionMaybe you have already built websites the tradi onal way. That basically meant crea ng HTML documents—web pages—one by one. As the site grew, you'd end up with a bunch of HTML documents, trying to keep all of them organized and making sure all menu links stayed up-to-date. You'd probably maintain the site by yourself, because it was hard for other people to learn their way around the structure of your par cular site, or be profi cient in the web edi ng so ware you use.



A New and Easy Way to Build Websites

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Let's learn about the Holy Grail of web building: CMS! CMS is an applica on that runs on a web server. It allows you to develop and maintain a website online using a web browser. It comes packed with features, ranging from basic features to add and modify content to advanced func onality such as user registra on or site search capability. In short, CMS makes it possible to build sites that would normally involve a full team of web professionals with a massive amount of me, money, and exper se at their disposal.

All that magic is made possible because CMS is really an advanced set of scripts (wri en in a scrip ng language such as PHP) that uses a database to store the content of your website. From that database, it retrieves bits and pieces of content and presents them as web pages.

This dynamic way of storing and presen ng content makes CMS very fl exible. Do you want to show only a selec on of ar cles from a specifi c category on a page? Do you want to display only the intro texts of the most recent ar cles on the home page? Do you want to add a list of links to the most popular contents? Do you want to limit access to registered users? It's all possible—just pick the right se ngs. Addi onally, CMS allows you to integrate all sorts of extra features, such as contact forms, picture galleries, and much more.

The best part is that such CMSes are yours to download and deploy today. You can pick your CMS of choice from a range of freely available open source products. Your new CMS-powered site can be online tomorrow. Now how's that for a great deal?

What's open source so ware? The source code of this type of so ware is unlocked, unlike most so ware developed commercially. Everyone has access to the Joomla source code and so ware developers are encouraged to modify and help improve the so ware. The name Joomla stands for all together. It's as much a so ware product as it is an interna onal community of people working together voluntarily to expand and improve that product. Most of the open source so ware is distributed free of charge, as is the case with Joomla and many of the extensions that have been developed for it. Some Joomla extensions are commercial—you have to pay for them. However, it's s ll open source (that is, you get access to the source code).

Why would you choose Joomla!?There are many open source CMSes around. They're all great tools, each with its own typical uses and benefi ts . Why would you want to choose Joomla? Here's why:

People tend to choose Joomla because they fi nd it easy to use. It has a clear and friendly user interface that keeps ge ng be er every year. Using the redesigned interface, it's even simpler to create and publish ar cles to keep your site updated. You can manage content any me and anywhere, whether you're using a web browser on a PC, tablet computer, or smart phone.



Chapter 1

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Adding new features to your site takes just a few clicks. There are thousands of extensions available for Joomla, ranging from menu systems to commen ng systems and forums.

It doesn't take much eff ort to change the site's appearance. There are abundant templates for Joomla and they can be installed within minutes, giving your site a fresh look and feel.

The current Joomla release adds many improvements and new features, making CMS both easier to work with and more powerful. It takes less steps to install the so ware, it's mobile ready (that is, it has an improved text editor screen for crea ng content such as the screen layout that automa cally adapts itself for the device being used, whether it's a laptop, computer, tablet, or a smart phone), and it has tons of other new and improved features. One example is that it off ers great support for mul lingual sites.

Apart from these typical Joomla benefi ts, it comes with all of the advantages of a state-of-the-art CMS. Some of them are as follows:

Adding content and keeping it organized is a breeze (even if there's lots of it). Joomla allows you to categorize content using an unlimited number of mul -level categories, but you can also choose to use a really fl exible new system of assigning tags to organize content.

Keeping hyperlinks to other content on the same site up-to-date is greatly automated. For example, you can add category overview pages without ever having to manually update them—on a category overview page, Joomla will automa cally add links to all new pages you'll put in that category.

You don't have to maintain the website all by yourself. Other users can add content, add new menu items, and do much more.

The numbers seem to indicate that Joomla is the open source CMS of choice for web builders worldwide. It's been downloaded 35 million mes since its start in 2006 and the number of sites powered by Joomla is s ll growing rapidly everyday. It's one of the biggest open source so ware projects around, it is supported by a large user community, and it is constantly being developed further by an interna onal team of volunteers.




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For an overview of Joomla, its capabili es, and examples of real-world sites using CMS, you should browse the Joomla site at http://www.joomla.org.

What kind of sites can you build with Joomla!?Let's have a look at some great real-world examples of sites built using Joomla. If you're anything like me, seeing inspira onal examples is what makes you want to get started right away crea ng something equally cool (or preferably something even be er). In this sec on, you'll see a few examples from the Web and from the Joomla site showcase (http://community.joomla.org/showcase). They are very diverse sites from very diff erent organiza ons, each with their own goals and target groups. What they have in common is that they deploy Joomla in a way that you could too. They adapt CMS to their specifi c needs, making it perfectly suited for the content they present and the impression they want to make.



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Here's an example from the World Health Organiza on (WHO) Regional Offi ce for the Eastern Mediterranean, (http://www.emro.who.int). The home page uses various ways to present highlights from the site's impressive amount of content.




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The following example is the the Working Wonders website , a charity founda on (www.workingwonders.com.au):



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Joomla can handle complex sites with thousands of pages. Here's an illustra on of a content-rich site with a made-to-measure design: the Guggenheim Museum website (www.guggenheim.org).




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This example demonstrates that Joomla sites don't have to look anything like a typical CMS-powered site. You can use quite a diff erent design and s ll take advantage of the default func onality of Joomla to power the site. This site presents a Dutch events company (www.puurspecialevents.nl).

One fi nal example: the personal por olio site of an Argen nian ar st Angie Villé (www.angieville.com.ar).



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If you're looking for some more inspira on, browse the offi cial Joomla showcase at http://community.joomla.org/showcase or go to www.bestofjoomla.com and have a look around in the Best of Sites sec on.

Learning to use Joomla!It may sound too good to be true. Does Joomla really make crea ng state-of-the-art websites easy as learning ABC? Let's be honest—of course, learning to work with CMS does require you to invest some me and eff ort. A er all, working with Joomla (or any CMS) is very diff erent from building websites the tradi onal way. You'll no ce this as soon as you start installing the system. Compared to se ng up a simple sta c website that consists of a few HTML pages, building a site powered by Joomla takes a bit more prepara on. You'll need hos ng space that meets specifi c requirements and you'll need to set up a database. It's very doable, and this book will run you through the process step by step.




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Once you've got Joomla set up, you'll soon get the hang of crea ng a basic site. The next challenge is to get things just right for your par cular goals. A er all, you don't want just any Joomla site—you want to build a specifi c site, aimed at your specifi c target audience. This book will help you to go beyond a basic site and make the choices that fi t your goals.

Even if you are using CMS, it will take me and eff ort to create and maintain great websites. However, Joomla will make it both easier and much more fun for you (and your web team members) to get your site started and keep it evolving.

The approach of this bookThe Joomla! 3 Beginner's Guide Second Edi on isn't just about Joomla—it's about making websites, and it shows you how to use Joomla to make the best website you can. A er all, you can get a reasonable impression of the capabili es of Joomla by exploring the interface and trying out the menus and op ons. However, even a user-friendly interface doesn't tell you how to deploy it in the best way in real-life circumstances. What's the best and fastest way to get started, what features and op ons are par cularly useful, and what are the ones you probably don't have to bother using at all? I want to help you tame the beast that's called Joomla to fi nd your own way around it and get things done—crea ng a great looking, user-friendly website as the result.

That's what this book is about. It is focused on learning by doing—the structure of the book refl ects the process of building a website.

Feel free to skip chapters!Don't worry, to learn using Joomla you don't have to follow all the chapters of this book and the exercises in them step by step. A er you've gone through the introductory chapters, maybe you feel comfortable to skip to changing the design of your site or adding extensions. That's okay—you can jump straight into most of the further chapters and follow the exercises there, as long as you have a working version of Joomla and a some dummy content available.



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What's the current version of Joomla!?On the Joomla website, two versions are available for download: 2.5 and 3 (3.3 or a higher version). Joomla 2.5 is supported un l the end of 2014. It's s ll used, especially by experienced web developers who need a mature CMS and want to able to use extensions, developed specifi cally for 2.5. Joomla 3.x, however, is the next genera on and it's defi nitely the way to go when you start using the so ware.

In the past, Joomla used fi xed version numbers—Joomla 1.5 and 2.5 were the long term releases of the 1 and 2 series. However, in 2014, the creators of Joomla chose a new release strategy. There won't be a fi nal Joomla 3.x version—a er Joomla 3.3 and Joomla 3.4, updates will be released if required. These minor releases (3.5, 3.6 and so on) may introduce new features, but they will always be backwards compa ble with previous 3.x versions. Only major new releases (Joomla 4.x) can introduce new features that may break backwards-compa bility.

It may seem confusing that there's no fi xed long term release, but the advantage is that Joomla development isn't frozen at any par cular point. This way, Joomla 3.x users can use the built-in automa c update func on and con nually benefi t from minor new features and improvements.

About the example siteIn the course of this book, you'll learn how to build a realis c example site step-by-step. Instead of just learning about the capabili es of Joomla in general terms, you'll meet real-world web building challenges. Throughout the book, you'll achieve all the goals of your fi c ous client (such as "I want a website that my web team members can update themselves" or "I want a website that makes it easy to navigate through a large amount of content").

Now, who's that client of yours? It's CORBA, a club of Collectors Of Really Bad Art. They just love bad pain ngs and ugly sculpture. They argue it can be valuable art—in its own, ugly way. The CORBA people need a website to inform the public about their goals, informing the public about all sorts of bad art, showcasing fi ne examples of ugly art, and encouraging people to join and par cipate.




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You'll take the CORBA site through diff erent stages of development. First, you'll base the site on the default design and layout of Joomla.

Then, you'll add advanced features and shape the site's contents and design to meet the changing needs of your client.



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The CORBA site is a good example of what you can accomplish with Joomla. You start out with a basic website and add sophis cated features as you go. Of course, you can follow along in this book without having to actually perform all of the ac ons described. However, you'll fi nd that it's a good and fun way to learn building a site and honing your skills step-by-step.

SummaryIn this chapter, you've been introduced to the wonderful world of the Joomla CMS. You've learned about the diff erence between building a website the tradi onal way and using CMS. You don't have to create HTML documents (web pages) one by one. Instead, you can use a web applica on to develop and maintain your site. Using CMS such as Joomla, you can create more powerful sites that are easier to maintain. You've also been introduced to the benefi ts of using Joomla, such as its user friendly interface, the ability to add extra features, and the ability to change the look and feel of the site fast. In the rest of this book, you'll learn how to build a realis c example site with Joomla step-by-step.

However, that's enough background informa on for now—let's get started! In the next chapter, you'll get the Joomla so ware up and running. A er that, you'll get familiar with the way Joomla works and start building.



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