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

Barrie M. North (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 21, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0136135609 | ISBN-13: 978-0136135609 | Edition: 1

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 needs

·   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!

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (December 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0136135609
• ISBN-13: 978-0136135609
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.9 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #835,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Barrie M. North has more than 20 years of experience with the Internet as a user, designer, and teacher. He has spent more than 8 years in the education field, becoming steadily more involved in web technology, teaching web design classes to students and technology integration to teachers. Most recently, he worked as an IT consultant for two new schools pioneering 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 founder of Joomlashack.com, one of the oldest and most popular Joomla template providers, and www.simplweb.com, a service that provides easy-to-use, turnkey Joomla hosting for those new to Joomla. He also maintains a blog about all things Joomla at www.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. Barrie lives in South Strafford, Vermont.

He is the author of the best-selling book "Joomla - A User's Guide", currently in its 3rd edition and the comprehensive Livelesson Joomla Video series, both published by Prentice.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 58 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Joomla Guide! January 14, 2008

By Vicky L. Thomas

Format:Paperback

I recommend to every Joomla user who is less than "expert level" -- read this book! I have been working with Joomla 1.0 for about 5 months, so already had a basic understanding of many of the terms: component, module, etc. I purchased this book just before Christmas and took it with me to read on the holiday roadtrip. You know you are reading a great computer-related book when you can read and understand and make copious notes in the book margins...without sitting in front of a computer! Not only did it "fill in the blanks" about much of my understanding re: Joomla (any version), but I felt excited, and much more confident, about using Joomla 1.5. Great overview of Joomla, great details, great tips! A well-written user's guide. Thank you!

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable resource! March 1, 2008

By Stefano G.

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am a professional web developer (mainly J2EE and PHP/MySQL); this book really helped me to take a decision: switch to Joomla!

The book starts with an introduction to Joomla! (and CMS in general) and then helps you to start your own site from scratch (fresh installation with NO sample content).

Then you'll learn how to develop a pure CSS template and after that there are three chapters devoted to the development of three different kind of sites: school, restaurant and blog.

Along with a dedicated site and forum (where Barrie replies to ALL our "stupid questions" ;) )... what else should I say?

Highly recommended!

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Joomla Guide February 26, 2008

By Damon Chance

Format:Paperback

This was a very good guide for getting your Joomla! site not only up and running, but running effectively. Barrie goes through a lot of information on how to get people to your site and hopefully have them come back. There are several examples throughout the book on how to organize a site and why you would want to organize it that way. I had created several Joomla! sites before getting this book, I wish that had happened the other way around. I'm much more efficient now and I was able to use the information in the book to sell 2 websites within a week of reading it.

The only chapter I had any trouble with was the Templating chapter. Since that's a subject that could (and should) have its own book, I wasn't expecting to be able to go design my own templates after reading it. I did read another book on CSS/XHTML afterwards and I'm going to go back and re-read the template chapter as I think it will make much more sense to me now.

I'd definitely recommend this book. It has a lot of information that will make you much more efficient and effective at designing your Joomla! sites.