Joomla developers manual

Joomla Manual. Part 1 - Getting Started. When you first approach Joomla, one of the most important things to understand is how the system itself is organized. In order to help you remember what to do, think of this acronym: C. C — First, you need a Category. A — Second, create your Article and assign it to the appropriate category. Since Joomla is so easy to use, as a web designer or developer, you can quickly build sites for your clients.

With minimal instructions to the clients, clients can easily manage their sites on their own. Joomla is usually easier to get up and running and tends to have a quicker learning curve. Joomla tends to have better looking templates and a friendlier community, even towards beginner users.

The final screen of the Joomla installation is mostly a summary of everything you have done so far following the tutorial.

At the top, you can choose whether to install any sample data. For the purpose of this Joomla tutorial, leave it at None. Aside from that, you only need to check if everything is as you like and if your server environment passes the requirements of Joomla.

When all of that is the case, you can click Install. Joomla will then set up the CMS on your server. Once finished, you will see this screen:. Ideally it tells you that Joomla has been successfully installed.

You also have the option to add more languages. This will get rid of sensitive files on your server. At this point, when you go to the address where your new Joomla website lies, the front end looks like this:. Not super impressive, right? To make any changes, we first have to log into the Joomla back end. For that, go to yourdomain.

In the screen that follows, enter your chosen username and password to land on the Joomla control panel. Obviously, you can get rid of the two blue boxes by opting in or out of Joomla collecting statistical data, and then reading and hiding your post-installation messages.

On the left, you find shortcuts to frequently used parts of the admin area, such as creating new articles, changing the menu structure, or installing extensions. On the right is important information about the state of your site.

Here, you find the same options as in the control panel and then some. This is what the different menus contain:. Like other CMS, Joomla offers a way to change your site design without coding, which is what we will look at in this step of the tutorial. There are free and premium paid Joomla templates available. However, finding one can be tricky. Unfortunately, the CMS does not have a central directory for this. Therefore, you need to look to shops to find them.

Many of those who sell premium themes also offer free versions you can test drive. Here are a few places to get started:. When selecting a template, besides your own taste, pay attention to a few important characteristics:. Installing a template in Joomla is quite easy in principle.

Once you have made a choice, you usually get it in the form of a zip file. Either drag and drop the file into the field or click the Or browse for file button to find it on your hard drive. Select it and Joomla should do the rest by itself. Alternatively, you can also install the template via its URL if you know where the package is located.

Here, click the star icon to the right of the template name to make it the default for the entire site. When you now go back to the front end of your site, you will see that its entire design has changed.

Such is the power of templates. Note that, when downloading your template, you might get additional files such as quickstart , settings, and extension. The first is a complete version of Joomla including the template.

When you install that, your new design is ready to go when your site is set up, often including demo content. The other two files refer to stuff that you might have seen in the template demo site, such as sliders, etc. Most templates come with at least some customization options.

You can access them by clicking on the template name in the list. In the settings, you can make adjustments to things like colors , fonts, logos , sizes, and much more.

In this case, the template even comes with its own settings page that we get to when we hit Template Options. Some Joomla templates also have a preview option where you can see changes in real-time. For example, below we have changed the social profiles and contact information in the top bar disabled the branding at the bottom and moved the top bar to the bottom of the page via the Layout options. Right now, even if it looks better, your site is still pretty empty.

Time to change that. At this point in our tutorial, we will go over how to use Joomla to create content. Unfortunately, we have to start with one of the more complicated topics, which is modules. These are little units of content that can appear in many places on a page like building blocks. Here, set Preview Module Positions to Enabled , save, and close.

Then, go back to your list of templates and click the Preview button the eye icon. This will then display all available positions on your page where you can add modules and the names of the positions. Alright, now that you know where your modules can go, how do you assign them to those positions? Here, you can see all modules currently active on your site plus the positions, pages, users, and languages they are assigned to.

To get rid of anything already on your site, such as the login form and breadcrumbs, simply click the downward arrow button under Status and select Trash. If you want to add more modules to your site, under New in the upper left corner, you find a whole lot of options. The first thing to check is where on the page it should go. In this case, this is content-bottom. Then, go to the Modules menu, create a new module via the green button in the upper left corner, and choose Custom as the type. This is simply a tool for creating and formatting content that lets you view what you are doing.

Unfortunately, if we went over all of the options on this screen, the Joomla tutorial would get way too long. However, if have ever used a word processor, everything should look very familiar. In addition, you can hover over any of the icons to get a description of what it does. This way, you should be able to quickly figure out how to write and format text, insert headings, images, and other media, and anything else it has to offer.

When you are done, make sure that when you save, Status on the right is set to Published and that you pick the correct template location under Position pay attention that you also select your active theme!

In this case, we also want to hide the module title. Then, go to Menu Assignment the tab below the title and use the drop-down menu to choose the pages you want to show this module on. You can use this same method to insert other things into Joomla pages like blog posts we will talk about that later in the tutorial , banners, menus, images, and iframes. In addition, you can also add new modules via extensions more on that below as well.

For example, this is what the homepage looks like when we add the main image in form of a slider at the hero-section position with the help of a plugin and move the text module to content-top :.