Excellent Introduction to Joomla | Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website |...

A holistic approach | Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website | Barrie M. North

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	• Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website Barrie M. North Prentice Hall PTR, 2007 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 35 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

As the title says, user's guide to Joomla!

This book covers all the aspects of using Joomla! CMS. For new users (as me) it's a gude to manage, administer and build useful sites.

Excellent Introduction to Joomla

If you are looking for a well written book about Joomla then this is the one. I read it from cover to cover except for one chapter. Joomla is a very powerful CMS engine, and because of that, the developers of this engine will always struggle to provide a simpler user interface and experience. In most cases simpler does really mean less powerful features. This book tries to bridge the gap, by making it simple to understand the powerful features of Joomla. Two of its final chapters are real projects that can be followed and you actually end up with decent websites.

Another reason why this book is such a good book is his recommendation for some of the commercial Joomla extensions that are available for Joomla. I made two purchases for two extensions after looking them up and comparing them against others. When I did that, I instinctively realized that this book is GOOD.

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A holistic approach

The focus of this book is on creating a successful website using Joomla, rather than explaining every setting and feature of Joomla itself. Whilst it does comprehensively cover many of Joomla's useful features, leading the novice confidently from basic principles to more advanced concepts, it goes beyond this and gives excellent advice on how to build various types of website (blogs, schools, restaurants) as well as organizing content, using stock images, creating custom template designs, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising, and more. Novices and more advanced users alike will benefit from the wealth of experience the author brings to this guide.

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Joomla! A User's Guide Covers the Basics

This book covers most of the basics of how to set up a Joomla-powered website. Some of the concepts in Joomla are confusing or have misleading labels. Author Barrie North admits as much in several places throughout the book where he says something like "now here's the confusing part." Thankfully, by carefully reading the book and working along with the examples most of those confusing aspects of the software are elucidated.

However, where the book falls short is that it fails to clearly pull together all the disparate parts of the Joomla system into a coherent picture of how they work together to form the whole. The author does make an attempt at this and the text does provide some help in this regard. But I felt that there were still a few important gaps in my understanding by the time I finished reading the book. Fortunately, after about one more day of exploring the software on my own things started to gel for me. The book does give you all the basics but could tie things together better.

Finally, the quality of the writing is closer to what you might expect to find in a readme.txt file than in a book from a major publisher (Prentice Hall). I lost track of the number of times, the author uses the word "actually" -- a much overused word today. I'm not surprised to hear the word used gratuitously in conversation but I am disappointed to find this kind of writing in a book that lists for $45. And it's not just the colloquialisms that annoy. I found that the author's technical explanations were frequently perfunctory. When explaining a parameter it would be helpful to not simply state exactly what it controls but what its larger significance is or how it can be used. That sort of explanation is not always provided.

But, in spite of these complaints the book did serve as a useful tutorial that got me over the hump in understanding Joomla. Prior to ordering the book I had watched/read a number of free online tutorials but after a while I found that my understanding had plateaued at a low level. Searching for more tutorials to fill the gap became a time-wasting exercise. By working through this book I was able to reach a new plateau which should now allow me to confidently configure my own system.

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The First Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!-The World?s #1 Open Source Content Management System

If you want to build sophisticated websites that can be easily edited and updated, you need to master Joomla!-the world?s #1 open source content management system. Now there?s an easy-to-read, easy-to-use guide to Joomla! for every site manager, administrator, and developer. Leading Joomla! consultant Barrie North covers all you need to get results: installation, administration, site organization, template development, content updates, and a whole lot more. You?ll find never-before-published tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions, as well as three start-to-finish case studies.

New to Joomla? No problem! This book starts with the simplest design and system concepts, and builds your expertise step-by-step. You?ll rapidly master Joomla!?s power, even if you have no content management, scripting, or CSS expertise. Experienced with Joomla!? You?ll turn to this book constantly for its authoritative, plain-English, example-rich Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5 reference content.

· Understanding content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together

· Building Joomla! sites from scratch, and systematically customizing them to your needs

· Organizing content with sections, categories, blogs, and tables

· Creating dynamic pages and effective navigation

· Working with Joomla! modules and components

· Search engine optimization for Joomla! sites

· Start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, an e-commerce site, and a blog

· The most valuable Joomla! extensions and add-ons: finding them, and using them

· Key differences between Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5, and what they mean to you

About the Website

The accompanying site for the Joomla 1.5 book, provides five fully functional Joomla! sites with live follow-along examples from the book and up-to-date information on Joomla! The site also includes

An active forum where you can ask questions specific to chapters from the book from a Joomla expert
5 fully functional Joomla 1.5 live follow-along examples from the book. You can browse the sites and their backends live online. Downloads of 5 free websites for Joomla 1.5 based on various chapter of the book. These are SQL dumps you can import to instantly give you a completed Joomla site.
4 free tutorial templates and 3 free templates from joomlashack.com including the popular commercial template - JS Aqualine!

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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