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

• Cover Type: Paperback with 480 pages
• Published by: Prentice Hall PTR
• Edition: 1st Edition December 21, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0136135609
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0136135609
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

The First Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!-The World’s #1 Open Source Content Management System

If you want to build sophisticated websites that can be easily edited and updated, you need to master Joomla!-the world’s #1 open source content management system. Now there’s an easy-to-read, easy-to-use guide to Joomla! for every site manager, administrator, and developer. Leading Joomla! consultant Barrie North covers all you need to get results: installation, administration, site organization, template development, content updates, and a whole lot more. You’ll find never-before-published tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions, as well as three start-to-finish case studies.

New to Joomla? No problem! This book starts with the simplest design and system concepts, and builds your expertise step-by-step. You’ll rapidly master Joomla!’s power, even if you have no content management, scripting, or CSS expertise. Experienced with Joomla!? You’ll turn to this book constantly for its authoritative, plain-English, example-rich Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5 reference content.

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

·   Building Joomla! sites from scratch, and systematically customizing them to your requirements

·   Organizing content with sections, categories, blogs, and tables

·   Creating dynamic pages and effective navigation

·   Working with Joomla! modules and components

·   Search engine optimization for Joomla! sites

·   Start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, an e-commerce site, and a blog

·   The most valuable Joomla! extensions and add-ons: finding them, and using them

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

About the Website

The accompanying site for the Joomla 1.5 book, provides five fully functional Joomla! sites with live follow-along examples from the book and up-to-date information on Joomla! The site also includes

• An active forum where you can ask questions specific to chapters from the book from a Joomla expert 
  
• 5 fully functional Joomla 1.5 live follow-along examples from the book. You can browse the sites and their backends live online.
• Downloads of 5 free websites for Joomla 1.5 based on various chapter of the book. These are SQL dumps you can import to instantly give you a completed Joomla site. 
  
• 4 free tutorial templates and 3 free templates from joomlashack.com including the popular commercial template - JS Aqualine!

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 fi eld, becoming steadily more involved in web technology and teaching web design classes to students and

technology integration to teachers. Most recently he worked as an IT consultant for two new schools pioneering in the use of technology. 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 and custom 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 for using Joomla!. His combination of Joomla! expertise, educational skills, and engaging writing has produced a book accessible to everyone.

Reader Reviews
I am fairly new to the CMS arena. This was the first book I got about Joomla. I had no problems installing Joomla (AND Drupal too, the latter of which I found far more easier to understand structurally & logically than Joomla) on my iMac G5/Leopard. But as someone new, I wish the book was more thorough. As the author has said elsewhere in the book he does not cover every option/setting in the back end. Therein lay me frustration. A user guide I think should thoroughly cover all the relevant options/settings and explain what each of those do, why they should be set or not set, how they work etc. The book is lacking a bit in this area. Moreover I found the book to be full of errors, wrong references etc. So I think the book wasn't thoroughly proofed. (this is especially painful to beginners as beginners tend to rely heavily on the accuracy of the content - once you get to the intermediate or advanced stages you may be able to spot these errors and know that they are errors.) The templates included in as supplementary study material had problems. When I went to access the companion website, I found problems at the site too. (When trying to retrieve a lost username/password, it will bring you back to the same page with no comment/error message or suggestion of any kind! Finally I was able to go to the forum and tried to retrieve the login info. there. It worked but instead of taking me to the appropriate page. I was told the page could not be found!). On a different occasion when I tried to post a reply to a comment, it produced an error! The point is, I found this kind of sloppiness (for lack of a less stronger word) throughout, in the book as well as in the supplementary material. I am planning on supplementing this book with another book on Joomla 1.5. Still searching...! Comments (2) | | (Report this)