Steven Holzner, PhD Nancy Conner, PhD Learn to: • Create interactive Web sites with Joomla! • Choose the correct modules, c omponents, and plug-ins • Include discussions, polls, RS S feeds, and more • Develop sites with optimum search e ngine visibility Joomla! ® Making Everything Easier! ™ Open the book and find: • Step-by-step instructions for downloading and installing Joomla! • Examples of cool Joomla! sites • How to remove and rename menus • Easy ways to add pages to your site • How to make menu options work for you • Tips for tracking page hits • Modules for ads, archives, banners, searches, syndications, and more • The secrets of keywords Steven Holzner, PhD, is the prolific author of 112 books with more than 3 million copies sold in 18 languages. He is a Web system design specialist and a former faculty member at Cornell University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nancy Conner, PhD, has written books on a wide range of topics, from eBay to field-programmable gate arrays. $29.99 US / $32.99 CN / £19.99 UK ISBN 978-0-470-43287-7 Internet/Web Page Design Go to dummies.com ® for more! Build cool Web sites without coding — it’s easy with Joomla! Joomla! makes it easy, and this book makes it easier yet! See how to link articles on your site with drop-down menus, invite visitors to rate content, enable a full-site search, allow your guests to sign up for e-mail lists, and much more, all with portable Joomla! modules. Instead of struggling with code, you can concentrate on content. Here’s how! • Jump into Joomla! — acquire the free Joomla! content management system, install it, and customize the home page • The meaning of menus — see how menus control the elements in Joomla! and use menu items to create your page layout • Taming templates — use these powerful collections of PHP and CSS to make your pages do what you want them to • Module madness — create searches, polls, menus, newsflashes, and banners with built-in Joomla! modules • Joomla! and SEO — build search engine-friendly sites and see how Joomla! can help boost site traffic • Extend your options — explore additional Joomla! templates and learn what to look for when downloading and installing them • Plug it in — check into plug-ins, components, and additional modules to see how they differ and what they can do Joomla! ® Holzner Conner spine=.72” 01_574639-ffirs.qxd 12/1/08 9:03 AM Page ii Joomla! ® FOR DUMmIES ‰ [...]... provider, ask your provider’s tech staff for help That’s all you need, though Joomla takes care of the rest Conventions Used in This Book Some books have a dozen dizzying conventions that you need to know before you can even start Not this one All you need to know is that new terms are given in italics, like this, the first time they’re discussed 3 4 Joomla! For Dummies Icons Used in This Book You’ll... turned out that he was formatting his entire site from scratch, using HTML, which meant that he had to get up at five every morning to enter the news stories in HTML tables and format them for his Web site He still had his day job (he wanted to quit, but the news site’s advertising was just ramping up) and found that he was working a total 14 hours every day Joomla was the answer for him Now all he has... Joomla Help Site 291 Joomla Official Documentation Wiki 292 Joomla Forums 292 Joomla Community Portal 292 Joomla User Groups 293 Joomla Translation Teams 293 Joomla Quick Start Guide 293 Joomla Quick Start Videos 293 xvii xviii Joomla! For Dummies Joomla Installation Manuals 294 Joomla Core Features 294... old days, you had to build your own site from scratch using HTML These days, Joomla takes care of all the details for you, allowing you to concentrate on the content of your site instead of struggling with the details of how that content is presented Welcome to the new era 2 Joomla! For Dummies How This Book Is Organized Joomla is a big topic because Web-site possibilities are endless Here are the... 151 Smile!: Adding emoticons 151 Adding images 152 Formatting Articles with HTML Tags 154 Working with Tables and Columns 156 Creating a table in an article 156 Formatting a table 157 Changing an article’s columns 159 Creating a Table of Contents 160 Back (And Forth) to the Future: Publishing at Different Times 162 Publishing articles... Syndication Module: Creating RSS Feeds 211 The Who’s Online Module: Anyone There? 212 The Wrapper Module: Displaying Other Sites 213 xv xvi Joomla! For Dummies Chapter 9: Laying Out Your Web Pages with Joomla Templates 215 Formatting Joomla Sites with Templates 215 Template Central: Template Manager 216 Changing the Default Template 218 Editing a Built-In Template... Loyal users What makes Joomla so popular? One reason is that it’s free — but you can find dozens of free CMSes Another reason is that it’s been around for a long time — but dozens of other CMSes have been around for years as well No, the real reasons for Joomla’s popularity are its reputation and loyal user base, both of which it has earned All over the world, you’ll find dedicated Joomla people who... Rich formatting capabilities ✓ Thousands of downloadable page templates ✓ Full text searches ✓ Plug-ins for commercial sites, including complete shopping carts ✓ Search-engine optimization features (still rare in CMSes) ✓ Scheduled publishing Where to Jump into Joomla The main Joomla site is www.joomla.org (see Figure 1-5) This site is where you’ll get your copy of Joomla; it’s also your source for. .. Choices: Taking Advantage of Your Menu Options 136 Basic parameters 137 Advanced parameters 137 Component parameters 138 System parameters 139 xiii xiv Joomla! For Dummies Setting Some Powerful Menu Options 139 Turning article titles into links 139 Showing article ratings 140 Setting menu access 141 Opening articles in new windows... visitors You’ve got to update your pages continually, making your site fresh and keeping it new You’ve got to have an attractively, professionally formatted site You’ve got to have tons of extras: polls and e-mail signups and newsflashes and menus, and more Who can afford the time to maintain a site like that and write the content too? Now you can Content management systems (CMSes) like Joomla are coming . Publishing logo, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, A Reference for the Rest of Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies Daily, The Fun and Easy Way, Dummies. com, Making. ii Joomla! ® FOR DUMmIES ‰