Joomla!: Visual QuickStart Guide [Paperback]

Marni Derr (Author), Tanya Symes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 21, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0321590589 | ISBN-13: 978-0321590589 | Edition: 1

Joomla! is one of the fastest growing Open Source Content Management Systems on the market today and has won multiple awards since it's release in 2005. Currently, Joomla! has the largest 3rd party developer and designer community, with over 160,000 current registered users, over 2,000 templates, and 3,000 extensions. This task-based guide to creating, customizing, and maintaining a dynamic Joomla! 1.5 web site starts with the fundamental concepts and advantages of a Content Management System and then walks the user through setting up a server environment, downloading and installing Joomla!, adding and structuring content, using components, modules, and plugins, and administrating from both the back and front-ends. The book finishes with more advanced topics, including CSS, search engine optimization (SEO), and customizing templates and the Joomla! framework itself. It's the perfect guide to getting started with Joomla or for those users that want to expand their skills.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Marni Derr is a writer, developer, designer, trainer, and consultant helping people build successful Joomla websites over the past 4 years. A technical writer for over 16 years, Marni currently writes and blogs about Joomla daily. An active member in the Joomla community, she continues to write for a variety of Joomla developers and template designers. You can find her portfolio at www.marniderr.com or her web site on all things Joomla at www.webcafestore.com. You can follow Marni on twitter @webcafestore.

Tanya Symes is an award-winning technical writer and a Joomla web developer. She has 18 years of experience in technical writing, web development, business analysis, and project management.  She maintains a Joomla web site for dog lovers at www.theimperfectdog. You can find her portfolio at www.reflectivecommunications.com.

Both authors maintain the supporting web site for Joomla!: Visual Quick Start Guide at www.writingyourdreams.com.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press; 1 edition (November 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321590589
• ISBN-13: 978-0321590589
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #940,205 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Big gaps in content, December 23, 2008

By 

Wally Z. - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Joomla!: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)

The book will help you get a rough site developed by covering the basics as well as the other books (none are great) but there are essential things missing that are essential to making a site acceptable and avoiding pitfalls that will make life miserable for beginners. For example, once you have prepared the content using the default template how do you get it onto one of the many available Joomla templates on the market. Instead they take a whole chapter to tell you how to convert a template in CSS or HTML to Joomla and that is beyond most beginners. Also, how to remove the Joomla logo from the template. Not a word and yet everyone has to do it. Moreover it is a pain to do so as all the discussion on the Joomla forum would substantiate. Like all the other books it also tells you to develop the site on a localhost and then transfer to the remote server. Many people including me tried that and ran into insurmountable problems transferring. A better approach is to do it directly on the server, which is easy. This book and North's book jump from the basics to the expert items and gloss over or do not even mention items in the middle. Telling beginners to change code is useless unless an explanation of the steps to do so is included. These are better than nothing until someone writes a good tutorial book, but if you are new to Joomla you will have to get more sources of information than either of these books.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, December 2, 2008

By 

Sherry Hansen - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Joomla!: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)

Finally, every feature covered, this is an excellent book on Joomla!

I started using Joomla a few months ago. After struggling a bit I decided to purchase a few books. After struggling some more, a friend told me she had seen a Visual Quick Start Joomla book in the bookstore. I thought, one more book couldn't hurt and I like the visual quick start series, so I ordered it. I don't normally do reviews, but this book was just the answer I needed.

This book walks you step by step through each and every feature of Joomla, from installation, organization, content, menus, modules, extensions, etc. If it is part of Joomla it's in there. In only a week with the book, I finally understood how to create and use each piece of the Joomla puzzle. This book not only tells you how to use Joomla, but what each piece does, examples on how it will look, what it will do, and even covers all the parameter settings in easy to read detail. Packed with the standard Visual Quick Start images I never lost my way.

Not only is this a great book for creating an entire Joomla web site, but also an excellent resource I know I can use over and over again when I have forgotten something.

The author's also have a companion web site dedicated to the book with downloadable files, articles, and a forum to ask questions. If you want to not only learn Joomla, but know exactly how to use it, buy this book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's easy to read but not well thought out, January 25, 2009

By 

Anonymous Rex - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Joomla!: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)

I bought this book based on my good experience with another Quick Start book but this one wasn't quite as well written. It seems to be a rush job with not much proofreading for clarity. The book does explore just about every Joomla function but it does it in an A-Z, across the toolbar in order, method. It doesn't begin with an overview explanation of how Joomla works. If it had, it might have cut my learning time in half. After working my way through half the book and using Joomla's on-line tutorials to answer the questions that the book didn't, I finally grasped the structure and use of Joomla. Like other reviewers, I did all my learning on an on-line installation while the book described a local (on your computer) configuration which wasn't helpful. For the price, this book is adequate.