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427 Pages·2012·23.16 MB·English

Joomla! 2.5
Beginner's Guide
An easy to use step-by-step guide to creating perfect
websites with the free Joomla! CMS
Eric Tiggeler
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Joomla! 2.5
Beginner's Guide
Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing
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First published: March 2012
Production Reference: 1200312
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-84951-790-4
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Karl Moore ([email protected])
Credits
Author Copy Editors
Eric Tiggeler Leonard D'Silva
Laxmi Subramanian
Reviewers
Peter Martin
Project Coordinator
Mohamed Abdelaziz Sai Gamare
Acquisition Editor Proofreaders
Robin De Jongh Bernadette Watkins
Stephen Swaney
Lead Technical Editor
Chris Rodrigues
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Technical Editors
Manasi Poonthottam
Graphics
Ankita Shashi Manu Joseph
Manali Mehta
Apoorva Bolar Production Coordinator
Melwyn D'sa
Cover Work
Melwyn D'sa
About the Author
Eric Tiggeler is the author of Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide and has written several Dutch
books on Joomla!, all of which got excellent reviews. He's also written a successful Dutch
guide to the Drupal 7 CMS. Eric writes tutorials for several computer magazines and Joomla!
community websites.
Eric is fascinated by the Web as a powerful and creative means of communication—and
by revolutionary software such as Joomla!, enabling anybody to create beautiful and
user-friendly websites.
On a daily basis, Eric works as a consultant and copywriter at a communication consultancy
company affiliated with the Free University of Amsterdam. Over the last few years, he has
written more than ten Dutch books on writing and communication. His passion is making
complex things easy to understand.
Eric Tiggeler is married and has two daughters. He lives and works in Hilversum
(the Netherlands). On the Web, you'll find him at www.erictiggeler.nl (in Dutch)
and www.joomm.net (in English).
About the Reviewers
Peter Martin has a keen interest in computers, programming, sharing knowledge, and
how people (mis)use information technology. He has a bachelor's degree in Economics
(International Marketing Management) and a master's degree in Mass Communication.
He discovered PHP/MySQL in 2003 and Joomla!'s predecessor, Mambo CMS, a year later.
Peter has his own business www.db8.nl (founded in 2005) and he supports companies
and organizations with Joomla! and Joomla! extension development.
Peter is actively involved in the Joomla! community where he is a member of the Community
Leadership Team and Global Moderator at Joomla forum.
Peter has also reviewed the following Packt Publishing books:
‹ Joomla! 1.5 Templates Cookbook by Richard Carter
‹ Joomla! 1.6 First Look by Eric Tiggeler
His other interests are open source software, Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, DSL, Arch Linux), plug
computers, music (collecting vinyl records), and art house movies. Peter lives in Nijmegen,
the Netherlands.
Mohamed Abdelaziz was born in 1977, in Alexandria, Egypt. He is married and has
two children, Reem and Omar. He obtained his bachelor's degree in Computer Science
from the Automatic Control department, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University,
in the year 2000.
After working for about eight months in Egypt as a FoxPro developer, he joined EJADA
Systems in Riyadh, KSA as an Oracle developer (forms and reports) until 2005.
He became a Sun Certified Professional in October 2005. However, after a short time,
PHP and Joomla! attracted him because of the increasing demand on this excellent CMS
in the web development market. He launched his first Joomla! 1.0.x site in 2006, www.
egyptianreviewer.com, which was a services directory covering all cities of Egypt. He
developed his first Joomla! component, Member Care System (MCS), and had it published
on JED; this was his starting point in the Joomla! development world. Since then, he has
completed a lot of Joomla! projects; installation, customization, and development from
scratch. Currently, he has four extensions published on JED.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites 7
Join the CMS revolution 7
Why would you choose Joomla? 8
What kind of sites can you build with Joomla? 9
Learning to use Joomla 14
What you'll learn using this book 14
About the example site 15
Summary 17
Chapter 2: Installation: Getting Joomla Up and Running 19
What do you need to start? 20
Hosting space 20
FTP software 21
A great browser (think Firefox) 22
Installing Joomla in four steps 23
Time for action – downloading the Joomla files 23
Time for action – placing the files on the web server 24
Time for action – creating a database 26
Time for action – running the Joomla installation wizard 28
Got stuck? Get help! 37
Summary 38
Chapter 3: First Step: Getting to Know Joomla 39
Making the switch—building websites the Joomla way 40
Sorry, web pages have ceased to exist 40
Why is this a good thing? 41
A website built of blocks 42
Introducing frontend and backend: the Joomla interface 43
Your workspace: the backend 44