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What is Joomla!?

Joomla! is an award-winning content management system (CMS) that allows the site admin to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla “the most popular Web site software available.” Best of all, Joomla open source and FREE!.

Wanna see how it works? Lets get started…

To Install:

Step 1: Download Joomla from http://www.joomla.org/download.html

Step 2: Unzip package and upload to any directory you want on your server. If you want Joomla to be accessed as the homepage, install it in your root directory.

Step 3: After all of the files have been uploaded, create a new database and user in your MySQL databases in your site’s cpanel.

Step 4: Run the installation script by accessing install.php in the directory you installed Joomla in. Example: I installed it in my root directory so I would run www.mydomain.com/install.php

Step 5: Follow the instructions until your installation is complete.

Learn the admin Control Panel.

You must log into the Joomla administrator by going to www.yourdomain.com/administrator – Or if you installed it in a different directory you would go to www.yourdomain.com/folder/administrator

Your login name and password is what you instructed it to be when setting up the database during the installation.

Once you’ve logged in, you will see your administrator control panel.

A fresh installation of Joomla! will have one User installed. This User is known as the Super Administrator. The Super Administrator has the login name of ‘admin’. You will have created a password during the Joomla! installation for the Super Administrator

Each Joomla! User is assigned to a group. There are currently three (3) groups of Users with login privileges to the Administrator Back-end: Super Administrator, Administrator, and Manager.

Notice the menubar.

*The menu bar is your navigation center within the control panel.

WARNING!: Usage of some pop-up blocking utilities such as Norton Internet Security may prevent the menu drop-downsto function properly. Excluding the Joomla! site from the program fixes the problem.

To Learn more about the admin control panel, visit the Joomla! Administrator Overview**WIP

To Change the Theme

Located on the menubar, choose extensions > template manager

If you have uploaded a theme you may have downloaded from the internet into the templates folder on your server, you will see that theme in the template manager as well.

Joomla has 3 themes installed by default:

1. beez
2. JA_Purity
3. rhuk_milkyway

You can select any of these themes and set them as the default, or you can edit them. To edit a theme, select the theme you would like to edit, then choose “edit” on the top left corner of your template manager control panel.

Once you’ve entered the template editor, you can choose to edit the HTML or the CSS. While editing the HTML, you can choose what you want to appear on the pages. You can add or delete modules to your liking. Editing the CSS will allow you to customize the asthetic appeal of your site.

Joomla! Global Configuration

Now we can start tuning your Joomla, including changing the default language. In your administrator’s panel visit Site – > Global Configuration.

In the first Site tab you can:

• make your website unavailable to the public while it is still in development
• change the offline message;
• choose a Site Name (Company Name) for your website – that would be the <title> tag of your website;
• change the default HTML editor, and
• the number of items in each list.

The Locale tab allows you to:

• specify locale different from the default one;
• change the TimeZone settings. Siteground’s servers are set in CDT (Central Daylight Time) and you might wish to adjust it to yours.
• select the language that the site will display – it can be picked up amongst the ones already installed and published language packs on your Joomla system.

In the Content tab you can choose whether to display the printer-friendly version link in your content.

For those of the options that sound unfamiliar to you, additional information can be obtained when hovering with the mouse pointer over the blue ‘i’ circle at the end of each row.

If you have to change the database setting, you can do this in the Database tab. The server, database name, user and password can be edited from that tab.

Please, find below information about the other options in the Global configuration tab:

• Meta data, Mail, Stats
• Search Engine Friendly URLs

Customize Joomla!

If you don’t want to write your own design and code, a plethora of resources are available on the web!

Here are just a few:

Joomla24
Provides more than 1,500 free Joomla templates.

Design for Joomla
A large collection of free templates for downloading.

Funky Visions
Offers a number of free templates for downloading.

IbolDesign
IbolDesign offers some free templates for downloading.

Rocket Theme
Rocket Theme is another premium template club; it also offers four free templates.

Joomla Shack
A marketplace for free and premium templates.

Joomla Jet
A premium theme marketplace that offers three different levels of membership.

Joomla Art
Another premium template club; it also provides some tutorials and additional resources.

Blank Joomla 1.5 Template
A free starting point for your template development.

DJoomla
A collection of free user-submitted templates, among other resources.

SiteGround
This hosting company provides a number of free templates for Joomla users.

OSSkins
A home for free and premium templates for Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.

Extentions, Plugins, and Add-ons.

Like any other open-source CMS, Joomla comes with certain features and
functionality out of the box, but additional features are available
through extensions, plug-ins and add-ons. Like the templates, some are
free and some are premium.

Here are a few resources:

Joomla Extensions Directory
The official directory of extensions.

Joomla Add-Ons
An excellent collection of free components, modules and plug-ins, as well as some for sale.

JoomlaWorks
JoomlaWorks sells some premium plug-ins, but it also offers a number of useful plug-ins for free downloading.

Joomla Bamboo
Joomla Bamboo offers premium extensions and templates, but it also has some free resources.

VirtueMart
VirtueMart is a free open-source e-commerce solution for Joomla and Mambo websites.

DJoomla
Directory of user-submitted Joomla modules.

iJoomla
A third-party extension directory is available at iJoomla.

SiteGround
A collection of Joomla add-ons, some free and some premium.

UltiJoomla
A blog that includes a number of free extensions.

More about Joomla!

Joomla! is a free open-source CMS with plenty of resources out there for the user. Plugins can be added to achieve the functionality the admin is looking for in their site. Although Joomla! is free, many of its add-ons are not – but not all. There’s no need to worry, there are also many free plugins and addons to improve the functionality of Joomla!.

If you are having a problem configuring or customizing your site using Joomla!, many forums are available to help you in your time of need! Finding information online about this CMS is very simple. Just Google it!

Joomla! being what it is, I found this snippet of text from siteground.com that sums up the functionality of Joomla!

Joomla 1.5 is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS). With it you can easily create and manage your website. If you have little or no programming skills, Joomla is the right tool for you! With Joomla you can quickly set up a professional-looking website, choose among many free Joomla templates, create articles, add contact forms, polls, counter, allow user registrations, install extensions for additional functionality, etc. And the best of all, Joomla is absolutely free (GNU / GPL license).