Introducing Joomla

Using Joomla

Well, the entire scope of what you can do with Joomla is far too much for a single article. The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Joomla is a reference that gently leads you through what you need to know to become a seasoned Joomla master. For now though, we’ll look at how to place a few articles on the site.

Joomla is one of the few content management systems that completely separates administrative duties from the actual web site that your visitors see. We reach the Administrator by adding “/administrator/” to the URL path in your browser, for example: http://www.example.com/joomla/administator/.

You’ll be asked for a login Username and Password. The Username is “admin” by default and the password is what you set during the installation process. Once you’re in, you’ll see what is called the Control Panel, a screen that will become very familiar to you over time.

We want to start writing some cool stuff, so find and click the Article Manager icon in the Control Panel (or from the menu bar hover over Content and then select Article Manager).

This is a very typical page in the Joomla Administrator. Below the menu bar is the Toolbar, and below that a table that will eventually show all the articles we’ve written. The Toolbar has icons for performing operations on selected items in the list, or standalone operations. For now, let’s create an article. Click New in the Toolbar.

This is the screen in which you create or edit your articles. There are many fields but the basics for an article are:

• Title—the article’s title, naturally
• Alias—used in search-friendly URLs (called SEF in Joomla) when enabled
• Published—whether the article is visible to visitors on the site
• Front Page—enables you to make the article appear on your web site’s front page

In addition, Joomla has a two-level hierarchical system:

• Section—the top level
• Category—the second level

For this example, provide a suitable Title but leave the Alias field blank (this will be automatically generated). Select Yes for Published and Yes for Front Page. In the Section drop-down menu, select Uncategorized. The Category drop-down list will automatically select Uncategorized as well.

Under the top fieldset is usually a WYSIWYG editor for the body content of your article. In this editor you can place whatever content you want for the article. Joomla supports the concept of separate introductory text and article content (it also supports pages within articles, but we’ll look at that another time). To see how this works, type in a paragraph that represents the introductory text you want your visitors to see on the Front Page. Then click the Read More button under the editor box. A dashed, red line will appear. Under that dashed line, add some more paragraphs for the rest of the body of your article. Note that completing the Read More section is not vital.

Now click Save in the Toolbar. When the page refreshes you’ll see that your article is now in the articles list.

To see the fruits of your labor, click the Preview link that resides just above the Toolbar (or use whatever key or mouse-click combination you need to open it as a new tab).

Viola! You have content.

That’s about all we can cover in this introductory overview. Next time (if they’ll have me back) we’ll look at making the site sizzle with a new template (honestly, the stock one we ship is nice, but really boring) and adding a cool Ajax-driven comments system so that we can start a blog happening.

Useful Links

In the meantime, there are a number of links you absolutely have to know about when beginning your journey into the Joomla-sphere.

www.joomla.org is the main site. The homepage is useful as it aggregates feeds from various locations, and there is some information about the project if you’re interested in that kind of stuff.

community.joomla.org is the hub of the Joomla information universe. It hosts all of the official blogs that come from various working groups in the project, as well as a really cool aggregator of Joomla-related sites (take a look at JoomlaConnect—it will connect you with the highflyers in the Joomla community ).

You'll need to bring your shopping bag to extensions.joomla.org because it's the place where you find out what’s available to add on to Joomla. There are literally thousands of different bits to add—some free, some commercial.

If you really want to be in the mood you can buy a T-shirt, but your main focus will probably be all the books available about Joomla.

Perhaps less exciting than the other sites but useful nonetheless, the documentation wiki site holds a wealth of community-contributed information about using and extending Joomla.

Joomla® is the trademark of Open Source Matters, Inc. in the United States and other countries.