Customer Reviews

Using Joomla: Building Powerful and Efficient Web Sites

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the first Joomla title that I am aware of from O'Reilly, and I was interested in checking it out for that reason alone.

The publisher describes this as suitable for introductory/intermediate users with some basic HTML and/or CSS skills. As someone who teaches Joomla development, I was a little suspicious. After spending some time with Using Joomla, however, I would have to agree that this is an excellent book for non-developers, but with a couple of caveats.

Chapter 2 suggests to readers that installing Joomla with Fantastico is an excellent option, and I couldn't disagree. The downside to this approach is that not all hosts will provide the most current version of Joomla. This may pose some security risks to your site, but if you're more of a hobbyist than relying on Joomla as a business-critical site, that may not be a problem. Chapter 2 also briefly discusses how to install Joomla using FTP, as well as provides an overview of the technical environment needed to run Joomla. In a future edition, I would recommend either eliminating this information (it's too simplistic to be very helpful) or providing more useful links to additional information. For example, providing the books' links as a reference point to MySQL compatibility isn't going to be terribly useful. As a beginning user I primarily need to know how to find out this information, which is going to vary from host to host.

Across every chapter, Severdia and Crowder do an excellent job of explaining the functionality of every administrative aspect of Joomla. Further, they provide succinct explanations of every setting imaginable, and the book's index is thoughtful and well-organized.

One strange aspect of an otherwise excellent book is that the cover teases: Includes Joomla 1.6. First, be warned that this amounts to 8 pages, including some beefy screenshots. This chapter most appropriately should have been prefaced with the fact that Joomla 1.6 is still in beta, and not yet ready for primetime. Period. If you want an overview of 1.6, the book does provide it, but Joomla offers a better description on their site ([...]).

While I wouldn't recommend this title to my students (or other developers), it's precisely the title that I want to hand to new Joomla Web site owners.

Are you new to content management systems or even new to building websites? If you are, then this book is for you! Authors Ron Severdia and Kenneth Crowder , have done an outstanding job of writing a book that will help you to get up and running in no time.

Severdia and Crowder, begin by giving you a little background on Joomla, its history, and what the future holds. Next, the authors show you how to install Joomla in just a few minutes. Then, they show you the basics of the administrator interface. The authors continue by showing you what configuration options are available, and how they affect your website. Next, they cover some basic Joomla concepts and how they can help you best plan your website. Then, they give you an in-depth overview of how content is created, managed, and displayed within Joomla. The authors continue by showing you how to control layouts and use different navigation styles. Next, they show you which components are built-in and how to extend Joomla's functionality with third-party options. Then, the authors explain how to manage and display modules. They continue by explaining the power of plug-ins and the various types. Next, the authors help you understand the basics of templates. Then, they show you how to manage users and collaborate on your website with user permissions. The authors continue by showing you how to install, remove, and upgrade your extensions. They also show you how to convert your existing website to Joonla. Next, the authors will walk you through how to set up a variety of solutions: An online photo gallery, online calendar and more. Finally, they show you how to improve your website's search ranking, by using Joomla's built-in SEO/SEF capabilities and some best practices.

This most excellent book shows you how to build a website in a short period of time. More importantly, if you read this book from cover to cover, you'll discover the benefits of a content management system by converting to an existing site.

I already have some Joomla knowledge, but I really needed a reference book so when I forget how to do something I could look it up, and this book is more! I have started reading right through it and working on my website as I go, I have found it very helpful and I have learned how to do things easier than I had been doing! I have also learned how do perform tasks I didn't know joomla did. The book also has good support links, for the book itself and joomla in general

I picked up this book to add to the excellent online resources available for learning Joomla. I have limited knowledge of HTML and CSS. I am primarily interested in learning Joomla so that I can add some web development skills to my project management skill set. I found this book to be not much more that a description of what the various buttons and functions do. This information is abundantly available for free in organized formats in many locations on the web. For some, this may be what they are looking for; an offline user's guide. So far in my quest to learn Joomla I have found articles explaining why or why not to use a particular function or explanations of suggested practices to be the most helpful. There is very little of that kind of information found here. To sum up, I found this book to be primarily descriptive in its content. For the given topic and context I would think a text that is more prescriptive (although conservative) would better serve the beginning Joomla learner. I was looking for instruction but found none.

I've worked with Joomla for a few years and always found it difficult to answer the invitable client question, "Is there a good book I can get that will help me learn some of the fundamentals?" Now that is no longer an issue! With "Using Joomla" I'm able to immediately give clients an asset to guide them down the path of their own site management (and I learned a few new tips and tricks as well!)

Knowing that the authors are true Joomla experts and highly involved in the community makes me completely comfortable that the information included is tried and tested - thats more than you can say about most "how-to" books.

Thanks for an excellent solution to an often-encountered question (and for making me look even better to my clients!)

I don't want to bash, but let me give you the truth from my perspective. For background, I'm new to Joomla and don't have a deep PHP background, but am far from inexperienced with commercial software development on multiple platforms. I have now build and run a fully eCommerce-enabled commercial site, built around Joomla.

The promise of Joomla is that anyone can get a beautiful, fully functional website with endless extensibility up without coding. I find this to be horribly inaccurate. Sure, you can put some static web pages up this way, but there are lots of ways to do so without a CMS.

The promise, there is a great and vibrant Joomla community and support is vast and endless. Yes and no, what I find is that there are a lot of people using this platform and they do share information. Make sure you're comfortable with AMP and PHP. I'm not finding constructive exchanges involving higher level solutions. This will work, but you're going to have to code and be comfortable with IT processes. Of course there are other ways to build websites/applications if you're going to code.

So, now this book. I'm a big fan of O'Reilly titles and have several. I find this one is no different or better than the Joomla documentation already available on-line. Not worthless, but I don't see the value add. Expect the chapter on something to be list of the options available for each dropdown in that section etc. Not advice, not direction, just a technical list of what already either does or doesn't make sense.

Whether or not to get started with Joomla is a different decision. I'm not sure if I would again, but at this point, after much pain and struggle, I'm kind of one of those guys now. I get it more or less and I'll probably keep building sites with it. I'm not doing so without getting a lot better at PHP and moving things around within AMP.

Whether or not to buy this book...sorry O'Reilly, I don't think it's going to help you any more than what's already on the Joomla website. In fact, most of the content seems to be lifted directly from there. There might be a better book out there, but I can't recommend this one unless you're just completing a library.

This is a moderately useful book on the fundamentals of Joomla. Unfortunately, the authors have chosen to shoehorn 120 pages of useful information into the book's 416 pages. The book spends an inordinate amount of space covering menu options, frequently without any more content or organization than provided by Joomla's online help files. The book opens with 13 pages on introduction and installation. Although the book describes its audience as the non-expert Joomla user it spends the next 200 pages plodding through Joomla from Joomla's point of view, rather than covering basic concepts or tutorial material. This Saharan trek is followed by the 90 pages of chapters 17 and 18 that I found to be very helpful. Chapter 18 - "Extending Your Site" - was the best. The authors describe a number of popular Joomla extensions that often have minimal online documentation from their developers. The book's remaining 80 pages alternate between useful content and more tedious rehashing of the online documentation.

Overall, the book presents some useful material but generally misses the mark as an introductory guide. The authors seem to have assembled it hastily without much thought for their readers and buried the useful content among a great deal of fluff. I will look forward to a new Joomla title from O'Reilly. It will be too late for my introduction to Joomla but may benefit my authors and publishers as they are working to get started.

I have been using Joomla on and off for the past few years and I wish I had this book when I started. I discovered Joomla in 2005 before books were available and the only way to learn was by reading online documentation (when you could find it!) and reading and posting questions to forums and then spending hours experimenting.

Today you can save yourself a lot of time by buying this book. Joomla is based on creating Sections / Categories / Articles and then attaching everything with menus. This can be confusing, but the authors of this book do a great job explaining how Joomla works by providing a walk-though of building an actual Joomla website - JoomlaPetCenter. Like most good content management systems (CMS), the more you use Joomla, the better you become.

Unlike many beginner books, this one also focuses on more advanced topics like setting up a Virtue Mart e-commerce store and how to convert non-CMS websites into Joomla websites by creating a template. How to make Joomla SEO friendly, backing up Joomla and setting up extensions to create forums, calendars and photo galleries. It explains everything in less than 400 pages which is also nice.

If you have some experience building websites and can devote a weekend to this book, you'll know Joomla on an intermediate level by Sunday evening.

After many years of hand crafting websites front to back, I needed to learn CMS, particularly Joomla, in a hurry. Using Joomla: Building Powerful and Efficient Websites gave me the basics I needed to tackle my first contract. Up to date and easy to read, with links to all outside sources, this text provided all the info this experienced developer needed to build Joomla websites.

However, this is not a tutorial or a For Dummies book. It assumes at least a basic understanding of XHTML, CSS, and Javascript. Basic knowledge of PHP would also be helpful. It does not cover advance topics either. But it does give an introduction into the more popular extensions, like e-commerce, advanced searching, and pod-casts.

I found the text easy to read and understand. I read the whole thing - something I rarely do with technical books. Now I use it as a reference.

I read this book with virtually zero experience with Joomla. I have to admit at first I was baffled by a lot of the info, like the differene between components and plugins, how to set up menus etc. But now I use this book as a quick guide when I get stuck on a process, knowing that the information in this book is more reliable than trapsing through web forums trying to find an answer to a problem or a recommended component. It is well thimbed and full of sticky notes.