Prentice hall joomla a users guide building a successful joomla powered website dec 2007 ISBN 0136135609

· Understanding content management, what Joomla!. is an open source Content Management System CMSthat anyone can download for free.[1] This makes it an idealchoice for small businesses..

Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website

by Barrie M North

Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub Date: December 11, 2007 Print ISBN-10: 0-13-613560-9 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-13-613560-9 Pages: 480

to-read, easy-to-use guide to Joomla! for every site manager,

administrator, and developer Leading Joomla! consultant BarrieNorth covers all you need to get results: installation,

administration, site organization, template development,

published tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions, as well asthree start-to-finish case studies

content updates, and a whole lot more You'll find never-before-New to Joomla? No problem! This book starts with the simplestdesign and system concepts, and builds your expertise step-by-step You'll rapidly master Joomla!'s power, even if you have nocontent management, scripting, or CSS expertise Experiencedwith Joomla!? You'll turn to this book constantly for its

authoritative, plain-English, example-rich Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5reference content

· Understanding content management, what Joomla! does,and how its components fit together

· Key differences between Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5, and what theymean to you

Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website

by Barrie M North

Publisher: Prentice Hall

Pub Date: December 11, 2007

Print ISBN-10: 0-13-613560-9 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-13-613560-9 Pages: 480

Creating Widget Inc with Sections and CategoriesModule Content

What Features Does a Restaurant Website Need?Downloading and Installing a Restaurant TemplateOrganizing the Content on a Restaurant Website

Section 10 Clean URL

Section 11 Utilize Your Error PagesWhat's Not Here?

Appendix D Installing WAMP5

Index

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers todistinguish their products are claimed as trademarks Wherethose designations appear in this book, and the publisher wasaware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printedwith initial capital letters or in all capitals

The author and publisher have taken care in the preparation ofthis book, but make no expressed or implied warranty of anykind and assume no responsibility for errors or omissions Noliability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages inconnection with or arising out of the use of the information orprograms contained herein

The publisher offers excellent discounts on this book when

ordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales, whichmay include electronic versions and/or custom covers and

content particular to your business, training goals, marketingfocus, and branding interests For more information, please

Copyright © 2008 Barrie M North

All rights reserved except for Chapter 9 (see paragraph below).Printed in the United States of America This publication is

protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained fromthe publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in aretrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise Forinformation regarding permissions, write to:

Chapter 9 is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ for moredetails

Joomla! is an open source Content Management System (CMS)that anyone can download for free.[1] This makes it an idealchoice for small businesses Don't let the price tag fool you—Joomla! is powerful and robust, and more big organizations arechoosing to have open source software solutions all the time.This universal appeal has made Joomla! hugely popular as aCMS This is evident by looking at how searches for Joomla! inGoogle have grown, roughly doubling every two months (seeFigure P.1)

[1] http://forge.Joomla!.org/sf/go/projects.Joomla!/frs

Figure P.1 Joomla!—as Popular as Pop

[View full size image]

As Joomla! matures, it is being adopted by more and moreorganizations Its greatest advantage is its flexibility You cansee it on a huge variety of sites:

Corporations

Schools and Universities

Online Commerce Organizations

by Joomla! The book gives a general overview of management

of a CMS and teaches you key concepts regarding content

organization, editing, and templates Last, the book examinessome more general topics such as how Search Engine

Optimization (SEO) can be maximized with Joomla! and whatresources are available in the Joomla! web community

applications

How Should I Use This Book?

You can use this book in several ways You can start at the

beginning and go chapter by chapter as you develop your ownsite The book is carefully laid out so that introductory ideas inthe earlier chapters are developed and built on to help you

understand more advanced concepts later on You can also usethe book as a reference If you need some quick ideas of whatnewsletter extensions are available, head to Chapter 6,

"Extending Joomla!." Lastly, the Appendices contain valuableextra information about various aspects of Joomla!

Introduction to Joomla!

In today's fast moving web, if you have a website that doesn'thave rich functionality or fresh content, you will find yourself at

a disadvantage to those that do The idea of powering websiteswith a CMS has been around for some time, but it is only

recently with the advent of high quality open source CMS scriptslike Joomla! that we have seen these powerful CMS tools

coming into the hands of you and me

In this chapter, I explain in detail the difference between a

"traditional" website and one using a CMS We also look at thehistory of Joomla! and an overview of some of its features

Joomla! is one of the most popular open source CMS on the

planet The first step in becoming part of the "Joomla!sphere,"the vibrant community that exists around the Joomla! Project,

is to download Joomla! and install it on your web server

This chapter shows you how to get up and running with a

Joomla! site The two steps are to find and download the latest

The term "site administration" usually means the day to daytasks of adding content, managing users and making sure

installed components and modules are running correctly With aproperly configured Joomla! site, the administration burden isrelatively low Most of the effort can be dedicated to generatingthat all important content

In this chapter, we go on a whirlwind tour of the core

administrative functions you need I won't be going step by stepexplaining every last button in the admin backend, but ratherpicking out key functions, tips, and tricks that you'll need toknow to keep your site humming

Content

As a CMS, Joomla!'s primary function is to organize and presentall the content in your site It does this through content articles.These discrete pieces of content must be organized into a two-level hierarchy called sections and categories

This chapter provides an in-depth tutorial that explains howJoomla! displays its content articles and how you can organizethe hierarchical structure of them It details how to plan andorganize the content and user experience for the site It alsoexplains the hierarchy structure currently used in Joomla!,

sections and categories, and how to best structure content intothem for small and large sites

Menus are perhaps the core of a Joomla! site In a static HTMLsite, they merely serve as navigation In a Joomla! site, they

dynamic page will look like and what content will appear on thatpage when you navigate to it The relationship between menus,menu items, pages and modules is perhaps one of the mostconfusing in Joomla! This chapter explains this relationship sothat you can create a navigation scheme that works for yoursite

Chapter 5 examines how the navigation (menus and links) isbuilt for a Joomla! website and how the different aspects

interact to produce a coherent navigation structure

It's hard to find a Joomla! powered website that has not addedfunctionality beyond the basics with some sort of extension Theword extension collectively describes components, modules,plugins, and languages There are many hundreds available

both free and commercially from 3rd party providers

In this chapter, we look at some examples of core and 3rd partyJoomla! extensions We also examine how they are installedand managed in Joomla!

In this chapter, we start out looking at WYSIWYG and how itfunctions in the backend with Managers, Administrators, andSuper Administrators We then examine how authors, editors,and publishers manage content through the frontend

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) might be one of the most

people who use unethical methods to gain rank in search

engines, to their counterparts of white hat SEO, the good guys,how best to get traffic to your site is loaded with opinion andmyth

Trying to learn about SEO is difficult, to say the least In this

chapter, I emphasize Search Engine Marketing (SEM) I point

out some obvious SEO tips and how they apply to Joomla!, butI'll also discuss a more holistic marketing plan including suchstrategies as Pay Per Click and blogging

In this chapter, we go through the steps of creating a Joomla!template Specifically, we create a template that uses CascadingStyle Sheets (CSS) to produce a layout without use of tables.This is a desirable goal as it means that the template code iseasier to validate to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

standards It also tends to load faster, be easier to maintain andperform better in search engines We discuss these issues indetail later in the chapter

School websites tend to be medium to large in size One of thedefining characteristics of Joomla! is that it is very powerful andflexible, but can be quite time intensive to setup This leads us

It seems like everyone has a blog these days Many people stillthink of blogs as personal diaries, but more and more

organizations and companies are using blogs as a way to shapeperception of who they are and what they do Chances are, ifyou go to a website today, you will find a link to their blog

somewhere on their site What is becoming more common onwebsites now, is a section of the site that is dedicated to theblog

This chapter talks about blogs in a more general sense: a

dynamic communication medium for a person or organization tointeract with their stakeholders We look at creating a blog sitefrom scratch using Joomla!

Stuck with Joomla!? There is a tremendous amount of

information on the web, as well as many active communities toask for help

Six real sites that are using Joomla!, taken from a wide range ofindustries and types of site

What Is a Content Management System?

moving toward a site powered by a CMS

Most Content Management Systems are expensive, anywherefrom $50,000 to $300,000, but there are an increasing number

of open source alternatives becoming available Open sourceCMSs have become increasingly more reliable and are now

profits, and organizations

being used for important projects in many companies, non-Why Use a CMS?

A CMS separates out the responsibilities of developing a

website The web designer can concern himself with the design,which means that nontechnical people can be responsible forthe content

The modern CMS is usually defined by its capability to manageand publish content Most do far more, having the capability toadd on a wide range of extensions or add-ons to increase

functionality of the site

What Is Open Source Software?

Joomla! is an example of open source software; its non-profitcopyright holder is Open Source Matters.[3] An open sourceproject is developed by a community of developers across theworld, all volunteering their time Some examples you mighthave heard of are Firefox, Apache, Wiki, Linux, or OpenOffice.All of these are open source and both have challenged and

surpassed their commercial equivalents If you are curious

about how and why people should create powerful software forfree, you can find more information on these sites:

Note

The notes box denotes a caution about anaspect of the topic It sometimes won't beapplicable to all situations, but you shouldcheck if it would apply to your site

The Least You Need to Know

The key critical concepts explained can befound in the LYNTK box These are worthcircling in a big red pen or writing out foryourself on a cheat sheet

The full and proper name of the Joomla! CMS includes an

exclamation point, as shown here For the sake of readability,and a tree or two, I'll be dropping the exclamation in the text

www.Joomlabook.com

You can find more information about this book, including

complete browsable and downloadable versions of all the sitescreated in the chapters, at www.Joomlabook.com

Without the continuing support of my wife, Sarah, this bookwould not have been possible As we had our third son halfwaythrough writing it, she let me frequently slip off to work on themanuscript while she kept them busy Part of my thanks alsogoes to my three boys who (mostly) managed not to bug mewhile writing

I'd like to thank the third-party developer community who Iwould frequently annoy on Skype with questions about this orthat

Last, all of my thanks to the guys who live on the trunk—themany developers who selflessly contribute code to the Joomla!project on a daily basis

Barrie North has over 15 years of experience with the Internet,

as a user, designer, and teacher He has spent over eight years

in the education field, becoming steadily more involved in webtechnology and teaching web design classes to students andtechnology integration to teachers Most recently he worked as

an IT consultant for two new schools pioneering in the use oftechnology As well as web design, he has provided web

marketing/SEO, usability, and standards compliance expertise

to his clients

He is a partner of Joomla!shack.com, providing templates andcustom services He also maintains a blog about all things

Joomla! at compassdesigns.net

When not working, he can frequently be found on the Joomla!community boards, and he has written many free tutorials forusing Joomla! His combination of Joomla! expertise,

educational skills, and engaging writing has produced a bookaccessible to everyone

"traditional" website and one using a CMS I also provide a lookback into the history of Joomla and give an overview of some ofits features Here are some of the topics this chapter covers:

technology of web pages, but it's worth it to understand thepower of a CMS

To start, let's take a look at the historical development of webpages Conceptually, there are two aspects to a web page: Itscontent and the presentation of that content Over the last

decade, there has been an evolution of how these two pieces

[View full size image]

This way of creating a web page is outdated, but it's astonishinghow many designers still create sites using this outdated

method It has two main drawbacks:

All of the content shown on the page ("This is a web page")and the presentation (big and bold) are tied together If youwant to change the color of all your titles, you have to go

The next step toward understanding content management is arecent (recent meaning in the last four or five years)

development of web standards, a common set of "rules" that aweb browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox uses to output aweb page onto your screen One of these standards involvesusing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control the visual

presentation of your web page CSS is a simple mechanism foradding style (for example, fonts, colors, spacing, and so on) toweb documents All of this presentation information is contained

in separate files from the content

Now the web page generated might look something like Figure1.2

Figure 1.2 Modern web page using CSS

[View full size image]

styling has been placed in a separate file that the browser readsand "layers" over the content to produce the final result

Using CSS to control the presentation of the content has bigadvantages:

Maintaining and revising the page is much easier If youneed to change all the title colors, you can just change oneline in the CSS file

Both files are much smaller, which allows the data to loadmuch more quickly than without using CSS

The CSS file has the additional advantage that it will be

cached (saved) on a viewer's local computer so that it won'tneed to be downloaded from the Web each time the viewervisits a page

Note

An example of this can be seen atwww.csszengarden.com Every page onthis classic CSS site has identical contentbut has different CSS applied to each Youcan browse through the designs and seethe same content styled in hundreds ofdifferent ways

The Least You Need to Know

Modern websites separate content from

in a designated place on the page

You might be thinking, "So what's so useful about that trick?"It's actually very powerful

presentation/design and the "placeholders." This means thatnon-technical people can be responsible for the content—thewords and pictures of a website Most CMSs have built-in tools

to manage the publication of the content

With this in mind, it's possible to imagine a workflow for contentmanagement that involves both designers and content authors(see Figure 1.4)

Figure 1.4 The CMS manages content publication

A CMS makes the pages dynamic: They don't really exist untilyou follow a link to view them This means that they can beupdated/customized based on the viewer's interactions with thepage For example, if you place an item in a shopping cart, thatitem now shows up on the shopping cart page It got stored in adatabase and now gets put into the "shopping cart placeholder."Many complex web applications are in fact mini CMSs (by thisdefinition), like forums, shopping carts, and guest books, toname a few

Another good example of CMSs are blogs They have a

"template" that presents all the content (or posts, in this case),and blogs are easy to edit and publish The growth in the use ofCMSs for powering websites is probably due in part to the hugerise in popularity of blogging tools such as Blogger and

Wordpress

A CMS totally separates the content of thepages from their graphical design Thismakes it easy to keep the site-wide designcoherent and easy to change It also makesadding content easy for non-technical

people

The range of available CMSs is extensive—from enterprise scaleversions that cost $300,000 to open source versions, such asJoomla, that are free Modern CMSs are usually defined by theircapability to manage and publish content They typically haveworkflow processes that start at content creation and move topublishing Most do far more: They have the capability to add

on a wide range of extensions or add-ons to give the site morefunctionality From forums to newsletters, Joomla has over 2000pluggable extensions available, many of which are free and arecreated by volunteer developers around the world The officialrepository is at extensions.joomla.org and a repository

of them to find ones that might be of use toyou

The quality of the extensions also varieswidely If you are using the extension on animportant site, do the due diligence to

check out the developer and visit his/hersite

There is one large drawback to using a CMS They can be

extremely complex, containing thousands of files and scriptsthat work together in concert with databases to present a

website Normally, this means that a CMS site will be designedand created by technical staff and managed and run by non-technical users Joomla is probably the easiest to setup amongcurrently available CMSs, allowing users of modest technicalskill to harness its power That's specifically the purpose of thisbook, to guide a non-technical user step-by-step in learninghow to create and manage a website powered by Joomla

functions, often needs

custom code

Most CMSs have manyextensions that "plug in"

easily

Content Management Systems have been around for a while,but there is another factor that has contributed to their rise inpopularity and ease of use: The growth of the open source

developers and released openly to the world

As the Web has grown explosively, we have seen open sourcesoftware grow and mature to power the Web The most

growth has been the development of CMSs that are written in

The Least You Need to Know

Joomla is an example of open sourcesoftware It's created by a world-widecommunity of developers and distributed at

no charge

"traditional" website and one using a CMS I also provide a lookback into the history of Joomla and give an overview of some ofits features Here are some of the topics this chapter covers:

technology of web pages, but it's worth it to understand thepower of a CMS

To start, let's take a look at the historical development of webpages Conceptually, there are two aspects to a web page: Itscontent and the presentation of that content Over the last

decade, there has been an evolution of how these two pieces

[View full size image]

This way of creating a web page is outdated, but it's astonishinghow many designers still create sites using this outdated

method It has two main drawbacks:

All of the content shown on the page ("This is a web page")and the presentation (big and bold) are tied together If youwant to change the color of all your titles, you have to go

The next step toward understanding content management is arecent (recent meaning in the last four or five years)

development of web standards, a common set of "rules" that aweb browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox uses to output aweb page onto your screen One of these standards involvesusing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control the visual

presentation of your web page CSS is a simple mechanism foradding style (for example, fonts, colors, spacing, and so on) toweb documents All of this presentation information is contained

in separate files from the content

Now the web page generated might look something like Figure1.2

Figure 1.2 Modern web page using CSS

[View full size image]

styling has been placed in a separate file that the browser readsand "layers" over the content to produce the final result

Using CSS to control the presentation of the content has bigadvantages:

Maintaining and revising the page is much easier If youneed to change all the title colors, you can just change oneline in the CSS file

Both files are much smaller, which allows the data to loadmuch more quickly than without using CSS

The CSS file has the additional advantage that it will be

cached (saved) on a viewer's local computer so that it won'tneed to be downloaded from the Web each time the viewervisits a page

Note

An example of this can be seen atwww.csszengarden.com Every page onthis classic CSS site has identical contentbut has different CSS applied to each Youcan browse through the designs and seethe same content styled in hundreds ofdifferent ways

The Least You Need to Know

Modern websites separate content from

in a designated place on the page

You might be thinking, "So what's so useful about that trick?"It's actually very powerful

presentation/design and the "placeholders." This means thatnon-technical people can be responsible for the content—thewords and pictures of a website Most CMSs have built-in tools

to manage the publication of the content

With this in mind, it's possible to imagine a workflow for contentmanagement that involves both designers and content authors(see Figure 1.4)

Figure 1.4 The CMS manages content publication

A CMS makes the pages dynamic: They don't really exist untilyou follow a link to view them This means that they can beupdated/customized based on the viewer's interactions with thepage For example, if you place an item in a shopping cart, thatitem now shows up on the shopping cart page It got stored in adatabase and now gets put into the "shopping cart placeholder."Many complex web applications are in fact mini CMSs (by thisdefinition), like forums, shopping carts, and guest books, toname a few

Another good example of CMSs are blogs They have a

"template" that presents all the content (or posts, in this case),and blogs are easy to edit and publish The growth in the use ofCMSs for powering websites is probably due in part to the hugerise in popularity of blogging tools such as Blogger and

Wordpress

A CMS totally separates the content of thepages from their graphical design Thismakes it easy to keep the site-wide designcoherent and easy to change It also makesadding content easy for non-technical

people

The range of available CMSs is extensive—from enterprise scaleversions that cost $300,000 to open source versions, such asJoomla, that are free Modern CMSs are usually defined by theircapability to manage and publish content They typically haveworkflow processes that start at content creation and move topublishing Most do far more: They have the capability to add

on a wide range of extensions or add-ons to give the site morefunctionality From forums to newsletters, Joomla has over 2000pluggable extensions available, many of which are free and arecreated by volunteer developers around the world The officialrepository is at extensions.joomla.org and a repository

of them to find ones that might be of use toyou

The quality of the extensions also varieswidely If you are using the extension on animportant site, do the due diligence to

check out the developer and visit his/hersite

There is one large drawback to using a CMS They can be

extremely complex, containing thousands of files and scriptsthat work together in concert with databases to present a

website Normally, this means that a CMS site will be designedand created by technical staff and managed and run by non-technical users Joomla is probably the easiest to setup amongcurrently available CMSs, allowing users of modest technicalskill to harness its power That's specifically the purpose of thisbook, to guide a non-technical user step-by-step in learninghow to create and manage a website powered by Joomla