Building Websites with Joomla! v1.0: This best selling book has now been updated for the latest Joomla 1.5 release (Paperback)

by Hagen Graf (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

• A step by step tutorial to getting your Joomla! CMS website up fast
• Walk through each step in a friendly and accessible way
• Customize and extend your Joomla! site
• Get your Joomla! website up fast

In Detail

Joomla! is a fully featured web content management system and was created in Summer 2005 as a fork from the hugely popular Mambo CMS with many of the original Mambo developers moving their efforts to Joomla! While still in its first release, it is supported by an active and well organized open source development team and community. Joomla! is both easy to use at the entry level for creating basic websites, whilst having the power and flexibility to support complex web applications. Joomla! implements the core requirements of a full-featured CMS. It has a powerful and extensible templating system with the ability to upload and manage many different data types. User access control, content approval, rich administrative control, and content display scheduling are all built-in. New features and extensions are constantly added to the core system, with many more being available and supported by the community

What you will learn from this book?

The book begins by introducing Joomla! and concepts behind content management. Then the installation of Joomla!, and its supporting software [Apache/MySQL/PHP] is covered clearly and simply. Once you have the installation up and running, we then take a tour of Joomla! as it appears out of the box, to familiarize ourselves with how it works and what is what. As you take the tour, your own ideas for what you need in your new website begin to crystallize around what you can see Joomla! is capable of. We then build our web application, using only the features of Joomla! we really need. Once we have a base version of our site up, we then learn how to change its appearance and feature set to suit our particular requirements, including bringing it into line with an established corporate identity. At the end of the book we show how you can add your own extensions to Joomla!.

Approach

This book focuses on taking you through the essential tasks to create a Joomla! site as fast as possible. These essential tasks are explained clearly, with well structured step-by-step instructions. The book does not aim to cover every feature of Joomla! nor is it a comprehensive guide to extending Joomla!. Almost everything in the book is accomplished without recourse to the underlying PHP code in which Joomla! is written. The book is very readable and the author has a particularly chatty and engaging writing style.

Who this book is written for?

This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors and marketing professionals who want develop a fully featured web presence in a simple and straightforward process. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive web site.

About the Author

Hagen Graf

Hagen Graf was born in July 1964. Born and raised in Lower Saxony, Germany, his first contact with a computer was in the late seventies with a Radioshack TRS 80. As a salesperson, he organized his customers' data by programming suitable applications. This gave him a big advantage over other salesmen. With the intention of honing his skills, he joined evening courses in programming and became a programmer. Nowadays he works in his wife's consulting company as a trainer, consultant, and programmer (cocoate.com). Hagen Graf has published other books in German, about the Apache web server, about security problems in Windows XP, about Mambo, and about Drupal. Since 2001, he has been engaged in a nonprofit e-learning community called "machm-it.org e.V.", as well as in several national and international projects. All the projects are related to content management, community building, and harnessing the power of social software like wikis and weblogs. He chose Joomla! CMS because of its simplicity and easy-to-use administration. You can access and comment on his blog (bloghouse.org/en/hagen).

Product Details

• Paperback: 340 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (March 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904811949
• ISBN-13: 978-1904811947
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #500,594 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't really do what the Editorial Review says, August 11, 2006

By	Stephen J. Cato (England) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My hope was that the book would do what the Editorial Review said i.e. walk you through the creation of your own website. It does not. It does walk you one by one through every possible menu item etc, although again not in a particularly useful order. As others have said, most of what is there is already available in the online help. It would have been much better to have gone though the process of building a site to show the user all of the steps involved from planning to implementing to refining...

My other major complaint is one of the legibility of the screenshots - of which there are very many. They are presented at a size where it is very difficult to read the text on them, although this is important to understanding the book.

There are other brief niggles, the language is strange in some portions, and there is one point where the author refers the user to a very good online tutorial in German (can't really think why a professional editor would let that get through.)

Lastly, the price is rather high for a computer book - maybe it would be better value if a real example based tutorial were added.

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Waste of Money, February 2, 2007

By	Marc S. Shiman "Marc" (Gaithersburg, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I bought this as a book and a download based on the editorial description. Just as the other reviewers said (I wish I had read them before I bought the book from Packt website!!!), the editorial description is misleading. All this book does is list the various menu items and options and VERY BRIEFLY describes what they do. There is no tutorial here, there is no step-by-step here.

Honestly, I played with the software for a few hours before I bought the book and I felt I was already way ahead of what was written here. Bitterly disappointed.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Horrible Introduction to Joomla!, May 11, 2007

By	Walter Stoneburner (Ashburn, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Having downloaded and installed Joomla without incident, I played around with the administration pages enough to get a feel of what was going on: there were templates that had places to put sections, which contained various categories, that contained content. After convincing myself Joomla! was exactly what I wanted, there were three tasks I wanted to get into immediately. 1) Removing the example junk from the page (e.g., "powered by Joomla!" and its banners). 2) Customize my own templates. 3) Inject some of my own PHP. Given that I'm familiar with Linux, Apache, MySQL, HTML/XML/XSLT/CSS, and PHP, all I needed was some simple documentation to show me where to start and how the architects laid out the system so that I could make modules that were Joomla! friendly.

This book totally failed to live up to the task.

There's something slightly off about the author's command of the English language. Word choices don't seem quite right, the analogies are obtuse and unnecessarily complicated, he gets overly excited about non-issues, and there's inconsistency between diagrams and corresponding code. (e.g, a picture will show something as a "section", but the HTML will show it as a "part" -- very confusing when it's unclear if this code is related to that picture).

The book does a half-way decent job of walking through each menu item, which is an extensive feature list. Problem is, the book is already dated, and the descriptions aren't that much more detailed than the text hints provided on Joomla! pages themselves.

The section that talks about creating templates instead presents a horrible and incomplete example of basic HTML, no where getting to what you need to know to make an actual template. Right at the point where PHP calls are needed to inject content or behavior, the book glosses over details, providing not so much as a function reference. In short, you're flying blind.

The section on modules and writing PHP is just as bad, if not more so incomplete. You're pointed a list of modules other people have written, but given very little instructions other than to fill out the forms when presented after installation.

I was really under impressed with this book.

After going through the whole book, I realized there wasn't a thing covered that I hadn't figured out in 15 minutes of casual playing with the software.

There's much more that's needed other than a bunch of screen shots. This book simply doesn't deliver. Try another title.