Joomla! 2.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide About the Book ..........................................................................12 It is free of charge ...............................................................................................12 It helps you to solve your tasks ............................................................................12 It is sponsored ......................................................................................................12 It's collaborative work ............
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide eCommerce .........................................................................................................27 Kokoro ................................................................................................................28 Tranquillity Blue .................................................................................................29 And? ....................................................................................................................
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Database ..............................................................................................................52 Elements of Joomla .............................................................................................53 What's New? ...............................................................................60 New Features in Joomla 2.5 ................................................................................60 Multilanguage ........................
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Positions ............................................................................................................121 Core Templates .................................................................................................123 Styles .................................................................................................................124 Navigation ................................................................................127 Breadcrumbs ..........
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Banners .............................................................................................................154 Contacts ............................................................................................................160 Example ............................................................................................................160 Messaging ..........................................................................................................
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Editors-xtd ........................................................................................................185 Extension ...........................................................................................................186 Finder ................................................................................................................186 Quickicons ........................................................................................................
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Joomla 2.5 and SEO .........................................................................................215 SEO functionalities included in Joomla 2.5 ......................................................216 In Conclusion ....................................................................................................221 Multi-Language Websites .........................................................224 Joomla language packages ......................................
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Three thing you need to be aware of all the way through ................................247 First some definitions ........................................................................................248 Findings .............................................................................................................249 Household Psychology one-on-one ...................................................................249 Deadline first flex scope ......................
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Certificates ........................................................................................................260 More books from cocoate .........................................................261 cocoate.com ..............................................................................262 Spend your holidays in Southern France .................................
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide About the Book This book, as every book, has chapters, an outline, many screenshots and it covers the newest technology available in the "Joomlaverse". It is based on the successful Joomla 1.6 and 1.7 - Beginner's Guide and has been extended with more chapters. All the existing chapters are reworked and new screenshots were taken, where it was necessary.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Jen Kramer5. Chapter: A Joomla 2.5 Website from Scratch IT'S MULTILINGUAL The book will be available in three more languages. SPANISH - JOOMLA 2.5 - GUÍA PARA PRINCIPIANTES Thanks a lot to the translator Isidro Baquera (Gnumla) Thanks a lot to the sponsor Complusoft ITALIAN - JOOMLA 2.5 - GUIDA PER PRINCIPANTI Thanks a lot to the translator Cinzia6 It is still possible to sponsor the work and advertise in the book7. Thanks a lot to the sponsors Sigsiu.NET, joomla.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide RUSSIAN - РУКОВОДСТВО ДЛЯ НАЧИНАЮЩЕГО ПОЛЬЗОВАТЕЛЯ JOOMLA 2.5 Thanks a lot to the translator Alexey Baskinov 12 Thanks a lot to the sponsor Sigsiu.NET, JoomlaArt It is still possible to sponsor the work and advertise in the book13. DANISH - JOOMLA 2.5 - BEGYNDER GUIDE Thanks a lot to the translator Ole Bang Ottosen14 It is still possible to sponsor the work and advertise in the book15.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Advertisement http://www.cloudaccess.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 1 Introduction Welcome to Joomla. It is a free system for creating websites. It is an open source project, which, like most open source projects, is constantly in motion. It is unpredictable, sometimes indescribable, partially controversial, quite often very sexy and, at times, a little sleepy and provincial. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of these reasons, it has been extremely successful for six years now and is popular with millions of users worldwide.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide know about the system. Joomla, together with Drupal and WordPress, are the most used open source web content management system in the world. Figure 1: Google Trend 2012-01-17 worldwide Drupal, Joomla, WordPress In Figure 1, Joomla and WordPress are on the same avarage level according to Google search volume trend. Joomla and Wordpress are searched three times as often as Drupal. However, the search volume for Joomla has been declining since 2010.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Google Trend 2012-01-17 Germany - Drupal, Joomla, WordPress Compared to the world average, the situation in e.g. Germany is different (Figure 2). Joomla has almost twice as large of a search volume as WordPress and WordPress almost four times as much as Drupal. Here are a few statistics from Google Trends (Table 1): Country Drup Joomla WordPress World 0.3 1 1.08 Chile 0 1 0.82 France 0.2 1 0.68 Germany 0.16 1 0.61 Italy 0.17 1 0.6 Poland 0.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide UK 0.4 1 1.65 USA 0.66 1 2.3 China 0.8 1 3.2 Table 1 Google Trend - Drupal, Joomla, WordPress There are significant national differences in the use of content management systems. In Germany, for example, the CMS TYPO3 also plays a role. The search volume is comparable to Joomla. In January 2012, 2.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide harsh reality of office applications, data loss, insufficient memory, and hard drive and printer configuration adventures. The wonderful relationships between these things have been changed with the user-centred way of Web 2.0 and the use of smart phones, but this does not necessarily make it easier.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Until a few years ago, the creation of a website was a difficult thing to do. Whilst you did not have to be a renowned specialist, a combination of perseverance and having fun with what you are doing were necessary to produce appealing results. You had to create static HTML pages in an HTML editor and then upload them via file transfer protocol to a server. To create even the simplest interactivity such as a contact form or a forum, you had to learn a programming language.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide 16. Users and Permissions 17. Extension Management 18. Core Extensions 19. Modules 20. Plug-Ins 21. Working with Templates 22. The Beez Template 23. Why SEO is important to you 24. Multi-Language Websites 25. A Joomla Website from Scratch 26. Upgrade from Older Versions 27. Earning respect and Money with Joomla 28. Resources? Although you are a beginner, you will be able to manage your own Joomla website via a web browser.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 2 Showcase What do websites look like when they were created with Joomla? This question can't be answered easily as most websites are based on the Joomla software, but the design is created by an agency and then "transformed" into a Joomla template. Therefore, the exterior of a website can be deceiving. Nevertheless, here are some screenshots to give you an idea.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 1: University of Notre Dame Website: ace.nd.edu Creator: CloudAccess.net, Ricky Austin19 3000+ GOVERNMENT WEBSITES BUILT WITH JOOMLA JoomlaGov is a showcase for Government sites powered by Joomla around the world. More than 200 countries are represented and, one month after its launch at 'J and Beyond' 2011, it contains more than 3,000 sites. 19 http://ace.nd.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide This site is a great example of how the Joomla community 20 can collaborate, to highlight the qualities of the Joomla CMS. FFor instance, the Citizen Portal of the Federal District Government Mexico City, Mexiko21 is well worth a look. (Figure 3). Figure 3: JoomlaGov Website built using Joomla, K2 & Google Maps (API version 3). The video was recorded at Joomla Day South Africa 2011. Case Study - How we built the joomlagov.info Website - Dwight Barnard (ZA) 22 Website: www.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 4: The Eiffel Tower Well, probably you know this building! Website: tour-eiffel.fr Creator: Mairie de Paris (paris.fr) ECOMMERCE A danish online shop based on Joomla and the RedShop component (Figure 5).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 5: Trend Bazaar Website built using Joomla, K2 & Google Maps (API version 3) Website: www.trendbazaar.dk Creator: redweb.dk KOKORO Kokoro stands for: chocolate that comes from the heart and soul. (Figure 6).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 6: Kokoro Website built using Joomla, K2 & Google Maps (API version 3) Website: kokorochocolate.com Creator: ohappens.nl TRANQUILLITY BLUE Tranquillity Blue is a site to showcase activites and adventures in a small coastal town on the South West Coast of Africa. The aim was to make the site manageable by the client and flexible enough to grow and encompass advanced functionality if needed. (Figure 7).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Advertisement http://siteground.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 7: Tranquillity Blue Website: www.tranquillityblue.co.za Agency: raramuridesign.com Design: Dwight Barnard AND? These websites look how websites are supposed to look. :-) If I had not told you that they were created with Joomla, you probably would not have noticed it consciously. More examples can be found in an article from January 2012 in techrepublic: 15 Joomla implementations 23 HOW TO FIND JOOMLA SITES? 23 http://www.techrepublic.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide I will show a few ways to find websites made with Joomla. joomla.org Just have a look at the project site! I found the sites featured above in the Joomla Showcase 24 . You will find 2,000 websites sorted by category. There is a site of the month, an overview with top-rated sites, and much more (Figure 8). Figure 8: Joomla Showcase Google You can search for the term com_content25. The component "content" uses this term in the URL of the page.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 9: Wappalyzer CHECK OUT THE WEBSITE MORE CLOSELY If you are on a website and want to know whether it was created with Joomla, have a look at the source code. In the header section, you should find this line: You can also just type the URL of the link to the administration area: http://example.com/administrator Here the example of the Eiffel tower site: 27: 27 http://www.tour-eiffel.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Administration of the Eiffel tower website GO AHEAD AND ASK YOUR FRIENDS I tweeted I want YOUR site :) Looking for 5+ great Joomla site examples for the showcase chapter cocoate.com/j25/ showcase plz reply a link+RT and promand promptly received the links for the sites you can see above! ANY OTHER IDEAS? Do you know any other ways to of detecting Joomla sites? Feel free to leave comments 28. 28 http://cocoate.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 3 Installation Thanks to the web installer, Joomla can be installed in only a few minutes. In order to install Joomla on your local PC, it is necessary to set up your "own internet", for which you'll need a browser, a web server, a PHP environment and as well a Joomla supported database system. We call this a LAMP stack29 (or XAMP) and a client server system. The Joomla files will be copied to this system and configured with the Joomla web installer.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • Versions of MySQL databases And on top of that, you can install and operate all these components on various operating systems. This freedom in choice of resources can sometimes confuse a layman. Therefore, we will discuss a few typical scenarios. LOCAL TEST ENVIRONMENT If you are at home or in your office, for example, and want to set up a Joomla website, you may use any of the following operating systems.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide You rent a server from a provider and install the operating system of your choice. You are the administrator of the system and you can work on it, just like on your PC at home. Before you venture into the wilderness of the Internet, you should first practice on your local computer. This has the advantage that there are no connection fees, it is very fast, and you can practice at a leisurely pace.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Download Joomla 2.5 at joomla.org30 and unpack the files into your root folder of the web server (e.g.: /htdocs). From now on, everything is going to go really fast because the Joomla web installer is working for you. Go to URL http://localhost/. Step 1 – Selecting a language The web installer appears with a selection of languages. Choosing the language is the first of seven installation steps. Set the desired language, and click the Next button (Figure 1).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Installer – Installation check It's a good sign if you see mostly green test results. Depending on your configuration, there can be differences. The Joomla Installer considers the configuration settings of the web server (in our case Apache), PHP, and the operating system. When using Unix Systems (Linux, Mac OS X), you have to pay attention to file permissions. This is particularly important for the file configuration.php.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Installer – License Step 4 – Database In the fourth step database configuration, your data base parameters will be requested (Figure 4). You can create any number of databases in your local server environment. You have a MySQL user with the name root. The user root is the MySQL administrator and can, therefore, do everything in your MySQL system. The password depends on your server environment (no password is needed with XAMPP, with MAMP the password is root).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 4: Installer – database configuration Enter the following values into your local installation: computer name: localhost user name: root password: [only you know that] Now select the database name. In a productive environment on a database server with a provider, you probably have a fixed quota of databases and the database credentials are predefined. If you have root permission on your MySQL server, you can enter a name of a new database.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide In order to avoid problems with access rights and possibly turned on PHP Safe Mode, you have the possibility to use the FTP functions of PHP for the upload and file handling. This is not necessary in a local installation. If you have installed Joomla on a virtual server with your provider, you can enter the FTP data provided by your ISP.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 6: Installer – Configuration – Name, E-Mail, Password, Sample data Click on the button NEXT and the data will be transferred. Step 7 – Completion In the seventh and final step you will be congratulated on having successfully installed Joomla (Figure 7). Congratulations from me as well! You will now see an advisory in bold letters appearing in the display, prompting you to delete the directory called 'Installation'.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Note: A file named configuration.php has been created in your document directory. If you would like to repeat the installation, you will need to delete the file configuration.php before deleting the installation directory. The Joomla installer will start anew when you pull up the URL in your browser, where your Joomla files are located. Now that you have fully installed Joomla you can begin configuring your website and content.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 8: Your website directly after installation Have a look around, browse through a few options and try to familiarize yourself with your new site. Many features of Joomla are being used on this website filled with sampla data. Next, we are going to look at these in detail! UNPUBLISH EXAMPLE DATA If you are installing Joomla 2.5 for the first time, I recommend you also install the example data. Take your time and explore the website and how it all comes together.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 10: Menu manager II Article manager Use the same procedure as described above. Open the article manager and choose all content items to unpublish or delete them. Cache To make sure that all data will disappear from you site, you have to clear the entire cache (Site Maintenance -> Clear Cache). Again, choose all content and delete it. Empty Website Your Joomla is now "empty" (Figure 11).
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 4 Structures and Terms I would like to explain and clarify some structures and terms before we begin with the configuration. FRONTEND With the frontend we mean the areas of the website as visitors or registered users see it. A registered user normally works only in the frontend. It is like in a store, where the goods are displayed in shop windows and on shelves. Here you can have a look around.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Administration You may access each function either by using the combined menu tab system or by simply clicking an icon on the start screen. FILES Joomla consists of hundreds of files. Images, PHP scripts, CSS files, JavaScript files and a many more. You probably already noticed this when you unpacked the compressed package and copied it into the htdocs folder. Basically, you have already installed two Joomla packages: one for the frontend and one for the backend.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Joomla 2.5 files and folder DATABASE Additionally to files (graphics, documents, system files, etc.) Joomla also needs a database. During the installation procedure, the Joomla web installer creates 61 tables in your specified database (Figure 4). In these tables, all content will be managed.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 4: The Joomla data base tables When I say content, I mean texts and configuration settings. The tables in the screenshot are displayed by means of phpMyAdmin. phpMyAdmin is a part of XAMPP and MAMP and is available via http://localhost/phpMyAdmin Usually, no changes need to be made in these tables. In case you forget your admin password, phpMyAdmin is very helpful.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 5: Article on frontpage The articles are sorted in a certain manner. The first article is displayed by using the full width of the website. The other articles are placed below in three columns. If the articles are too long, you may insert a read more link. This representation is a list view. By clicking on the read more link you will be redirected to the single representation of that article (Figure 6).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 6: single display of an article Articles can be published (publish) or not published (unpublish). You can feature articles on your frontpage, you can archive them or put them in the trash and retrieve them. You can copy and move them. Categories In order to display articles clearly, you must create categories, and then assign an article to them. Each article can be assigned to exactly one category (Figure 7). The categories can be nested to any depth.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • World Figure 7: Category assignment User Users are needed to produce content. At least one user is registered on each Joomla site, namely the one you created during the installation, with the rights to configure everything on your site. Depending on the user's rights, he can work in frontend and/or backend to write an article. Each user requires a username, an email address and a password. Every user can be assigned to any user group as well as to any access level.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide to upload a different logo, change the background color, etc. Each template provides areas where modules can be positioned (Figure 8). Figure 8: Template Positions You can group modules around one or more articles. Plug-ins A plug-in provides practical services but is usually invisible to the visitors of the site. A wysiwyg editor, for example, is a plug-in. Plug-ins are extensions, which can be installed unlimited amount of times.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide enables you to integrate contact forms into your site. There are thousands of components to enhance your Joomla system. Options You will need individual configuration settings for your website; we call them options. These options are applied to the whole website, for users, categories, modules, components. You will always find an icon named Options like, e.g.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 5 What's New? Joomla 2.5 will be released in January 2012 and it is the successor of Joomla 1.5. It will be a so called long term release and it will be the Joomla state of the art until July 2013. The versions 1.6 and 1.7 were short term releases and they paved the way to Joomla 2.5. When you already upgraded your site from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.7 in 2011 you probably use all the new features introduced with Joomla 1.6 and 1.7.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 1: Creating the search index Finder pre-searches your content. Search results are scored dynamically based on the context and frequency of search terms. The most relevant content will always be listed at the top of the results. It suggests alternative phrases (Figure 2) and its pluggable adapter system allows to install new search adapters which provide support for standard Joomla content and many other types of documents.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Offline mode options User registrations with Captcha A Captcha plugin using the reCAPTCHA service34 can be enabled (Figure 4). Once you sign up for free with reCAPTCHA and enter your keys, you can enable Captcha on new user registrations. It could also be used by other extensions needing Captcha. Figure 4: Captcha 34 http://www.google.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Easier handling for simple Layouts You can now attach an image for the intro text to use in blog and featured layouts, an image for the full article text and up to three links for the full article layout. This means that your content creators won’t have to fuss about an image in the text and your article format will be cleaner and more consistent. MULTILANGUAGE You can override the default language strings in a new manager in the backend (Figure 5).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 6: User Notes Clean Up Filtering for Categories in Article Manager That is simply useful. Since Joomla 1.6 it was possible to filter categories in the article manager, but you did not see the articles of the subcategories. Now the filter logic include the articles of the subcategories too. Linking New Menus with a Module In Joomla 2.5 modules are NOT automatically created for each new menu type.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 7: Administrator Notification The extensive options in “Select a Menu Item Type” are not loaded unless you need them. You will find a good summary in form of a presentation created by Mike Carson35 NEW FEATURES COMPARED TO JOOMLA 1.5 In comparison to Joomla 1.5 the differences are huge and there is a long list of features and improvements. • Here is a list of the most important changes in Joomla 1.6 and 1.7 • There will no longer be any sections.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • Updates per mouse click A simple feature. The system detects available updates and initiates them after a click on the corresponding button. • Templates There have been many changes in the area of templates. There are now two administrator templates and three website templates. • Template styles Sometimes you may want to display a template with different options. You may want to create a page with a red background and another page with a blue one.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • You can combine the title of a site with the titles of its pages and decide on the order they will appear. • Modules can be published time-controlled. The assignment options to menu items have been extended. • Multilingualism Joomla core now offers the possibility to create articles, categories and modules in several languages. With the new language switching plug-in and module you can filter the entire site for the selected language.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 6 Managing Content A content management system is made for managing content - who would have thought?! So the next question is: What is content? In media production and publishing, content is information and experiences that may provide value for an end-user/audience in specific contexts (Wikipedia 36).
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide HOW TO CREATE AN 'ABOUT US' PAGE To give you a first real challenge, let's create a first page on your new website. It will be an about us page on which you can write about your company, your project, or yourself. Most of the time, a page like this contains a title, text and perhaps a few images. Static vs. Dynamic content An "about us" page is usually created once, is accessible via a menu link, and in the future all you will have to do is change it as you go.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 1: Article manager Click the icon to get to the appropriate form and then add the title and text. In the upper pane, below the title, select "uncategorized" as a category. This category was created by installing the example data. The field Featured indicates whether the content should be displayed in the featured blog layout, which is mostly used as the front page. This still works in Joomla 2.5 but the terms can easily be misunderstood. Select No.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Article edit form Inserting an image from a URL As a first example we are going to use an already existing image on the web. For example, this one: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1198/898250237_78a0e75cba_m.jpg (Figure 3) Figure 3: Example image Move the cursor to the position in the text at which you would like to insert the image. Click on the image icon in the editor toolbar and paste the URL of the image to the pop-up window.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 4: Insert image The image will appear in your editor window. Click Save and your item is stored. There are several ways to save it: • Save - Item is saved. Form is not closed. Used for saving when you still want to continue working. • Save & Close - Item is saved and form will be closed. • Save & New - Item is saved, form will be closed and a new empty article form is called. • Exit the form.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 5: Assign an article to a menu item Now you need to choose the desired article. Click the button Select / Change in the right pane (Select Article) to select it. You will see a search box with all articles. In case you can't find your article on the page right away, you can filter the list by typing a part of the article's title in the search box and then clicking on the title of the correct article in the result list (Figure 6).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 7: About us page Step 4 - Image Upload If your image is not already available on the Internet, you will need to upload it from your PC. Let's go through the example together. Go to the Article Manager (Content → Article manager). If you can't find your article, locate it easily by using the search box. Select the article's title and the edit form will open. Delete the linked image from the text. Below the editor window you will find the Image button.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 8: Image upload Once the image has been inserted into the text, the formatting can be changed by using the image icon in the editor's toolbar. This separation of functions in Joomla was purposely chosen because you have the possibility to use different editors. The Joomla Image button will always remain the same but the image formatting in the editor might differ. Attention: Joomla uses the images as they are.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Administration area Article form You are now in the article form, in which you will probably write all articles you will ever write in Joomla. A very important place! The form is structured as in Figure 3.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Entry form for contributions The minimum requirement for an article is a title (1), a category (2), and a text (3). If you look at the form more closely, you will notice the help texts that appear when you move the mouse across the description of a field. I have marked the areas in the form in Figure 3 with six digits. Title The most important part is the title or headline.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide 2. Image: You can insert an existing image or photo from the Media Manager or upload a new image. 3. Pagebreak: inserts a pagebreak in your article 4. Read More: allows you to stipulate where to place the read more link 5. Toggle Editor: switches the editor on and off. If it is off, you will see the HTML code of your article. Options What was called Parameter in Joomla 1.5, is now called Options in Joomla 1.6, like, for example, the Publishing Options.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 4: Insert Image from media field 3. The picture is on your hard disk. This is the most complex case. Basically, you will also use the image button below the text. There you will find an upload dialogue through which you can upload your image "easily". Remember that Joomla will NOT resize the image. If you upload a photo from your digital camera, it will be displayed in its full original size (width > 3000 pixels). You have to resize the image before uploading.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide A scheduled publication would be nice Avoid this at first, so you don't have to wait for the article to appear on your website :-). If you would like to try it later with a different article, simply fill the fields Start Publishing and Finish Publishing with the appropriate information or select the dates by clicking the calendar icon.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide MEDIA MANAGER The media manager is Joomla's little Digital Asset Management System (DAM) 45. If you are managing content, you will need a place to store the files. Files are all the images, PDFs and whatever you decide to mention in your content. Usually these digital assets consist of the file and additional meta data. In this case, we need an easy-to-use tool to manage our files. Let's have a look at what is possible with the Joomla core media manager.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide your FTP client (Figure 3), but you have to be careful: In core Joomla you will also find a media directory. This directory is NOT the home of the media manager. The home of the media manager in core Joomla is the images directory. Figure 3: Media manager directory in ftp client When you look in the toolbar you will discover the Options icon - go ahead and click on it (Figure 4).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide The biggest advantage of that separation is the possibility to Restrict Uploads to users lower than the manager role. You can allow registered users to upload images but you do not have to give permission to upload other files. This is, in some cases, very useful. The next options you see are MIME 46 types, nowadays often called Internet Media Type. If you are a Windows user, you usually only distinguish different file types by their extension.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Anywhere you see an editor in Joomla, it is usually possible to add media from the media manager by clicking the image button below. We have already talked about this in Chapter A Typical Article (Figure 6). Figure 6: Media manager in content areas Media Manager in other places There are other places where the media manager plays a role, like in categories. It is possible to link an image to a category (Figure 7).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 7: Media manager in category This image will appear in a list of categories if you configure it in the Menu Items Options.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide CONTACT FORM With a contact form the following question arises: "Is this content?". I think it is and have, therefore, written it as a sub chapter of the Managing Content chapter. On a contact form it first becomes obvious that something like a CMS is being used. Manually created HTML pages cannot send emails as this requires a script language like PHP, for example, and a configured server.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • a contact category • a contact • a link in a menu Maybe you still have a category from the example data (Sample-data contact). If not, go ahead and create one. In the next step you will create a new contact. To do so, open Components → Contacts in your administration area and click on the icon New. Then fill in the appearing form (Figure 2). I have labeled some areas in the screenshot for better orientation. Figure 2: Create contact 1.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide 4. In Contact Details there are numerous fields available, which you can choose to fill in or leave blank. 5. In Display Options you decide which fields will be displayed. This area is important as you specify here whether a contact form will be shown or not (Show Contact Form). You can also specify whether the sender should receive an email copy and you'll be able to configure some spam protection settings (Banned E-Mail, Banned Subject, etc).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Choice of menu types The window will close again. Since you only want one contact, you will now have to choose the contact in Required Settings (Figure 4). Figure 4: Choose contact At last, insert the text for the link (Menu Title) and then save everything. The menu is already registered correctly by opening the form. On your website, an additonal link in the Top Menu should be appearing, which is linked to the corresponding contact (Figure 5).
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 8 Statuses, Trash and Check-Ins In Joomla your content can have several statuses. Depending on the type of content there can be a minimum of three statuses: published, unpublished and trash. What does that mean? After saving your fresh content for the first time, it exists in the Joomla database and depending on its status, it will appear (or not) in different areas of your website. The usual life cycle of content in Joomla is: 1.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide If it is not available, just create one in Modules → New →Archived Articles. Your articles will then be shown like in Figure 1. Read more in chapter Modules. Figure 1: Joomla Archive Trash The second last status is trash. If a content item ends up here it still exists and can be retrieved. You can place modules, menu items, categories, articles, contacts, and even more content in your trash. You can see the contents of your trash can by filtering it (Figure 2).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Trash In the filtered view the Trash icon changes to Empty trash. This is your opportunity to delete content. Check In The Check In icon in Joomla may not be the kind you know from Foursquare49 or other locationbased services. It is a security feature for editing your content. As soon as a user starts editing content, Joomla locks this content for all other users. The advantage of this behavior is that changes by another user cannot be overwritten.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 7 Structure Your Content with Categories Joomla articles must be categorized. Generally spoken, categorization is the process of recognizing, differentiating and understanding something through abs creating as many categories traction. This may sound rather complicated but proves very useful when managing several articles. Joomla offers the possibility of creating as many categories as you wish.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide They are using the category World News and under this category there are additional categories like Politics, World, War, Disasters and more. Sometimes two levels are sufficient like in this example; sometimes you may need more. In Joomla 1.5 it was not possible to have more than two levels. With Joomla 2.5 you can have as many levels as you want. Joomla no longer has sections - only categories.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Category Edit Form When you access your Joomla website you can see exactly these categories in the example data. The navigation uses links to the categories to show all the articles and sub categories (Figure 4). Even the breadcrumb navigation reflects this structure. Figure 4: Categories as menu links on the website In the Menu Manager (Administration → Menu → About Joomla), you can see these menu items, which link to the articles in a category (Figure 5).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 5: Categories as menu links on the website You can choose from different layouts for the articles. In Figure 5 you can see which layout is used for which link. You can select the layout in the edit form of a menu item (Figure 6). Possible layouts: • a list of all categories • a blog layout (like on the frontpage) • a category list Depending on the layout you have plenty of options to configure the appearance and behavior of sub categories and articles.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 6: Category layouts A list of all categories This layout lists all the sub categories from one chosen category (Figure 7). Figure 7: Layout All Categories In this case the category description from the top level category Extensions is shown. One level of sub categories with their descriptions is also shown on the page, even empty categories. The articles in the top level category are hidden. Example: Administration → Menus → About Joomla → Using Extensions → Edit.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 8: Layout Blog In this case the category description from the category Components is shown. All the articles related to Components are shown with their teaser text in one column. More columns are also possible. The first seven articles in the top level category are hidden. Example: Administration → Menus → Components → Edit (Figure 9).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide The category list layout lists all the articles from one chosen category in a table structure (Figure 10). Figure 10: Layout Category List In this case the category description from the category named Joomla is shown. All the articles related to Joomla are shown in a configurable table. You can choose to have parts of the table hidden and various sorting options are available. Example: Administration → Menus → Components → Article Category list → Edit.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 9 Website and Content Configuration Joomla has different levels of configurating options. These options are transmitted from the highest to the lowest level. • Global configuration • Options for articles, components, modules, plug-ins, languages and templates GLOBAL CONFIGURATION In the Global Configuration section you can define all the settings that are valid for the entire website. Most values of the variables are saved in the configuration.php file.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 1: Tooltips Most of the options are self-explanatory. I'll mention a few settings that are new in Joomla 1.6 with greater detail. Site Settings The Site settings have a new field for setting the default access level for new users. Configurable access levels are a new feature (Read more: Users and Permissions). The Metadata settings now contain the option to add Content Right data. Joomla will add your data to the meta declaration rights in your HTML code.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Site settings In SEO settings, the new options are • Unicode Aliases You set aliases for article titles. With this feature, URLs like http://example.com/所有一起 are possible. • Include Site Name in Page Titles With this feature the article title will appear in the browser's document title bar. Cookie settings are a wonderful feature for evaluating a cookie on different sub domains. You will need this feature if you have a site (example.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide All the server settings are the same as in Joomla 1.5. Nevertheless, I'll mention the option Force SSL. This option is getting more and more attention. You can offer your users a completely secured traffic. It is necessary to have SSL configured in your web server and you need a SSL certificate. Figure 3: Server settings - SSL Permissions Here is the place to set your global permissions for your user groups.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 4: Global group permissions Text Filters The text filters are a concept, which allows you to search contributed text for patterns like HTML tags and filter them (Figure 5). It's possible to set different filters for different groups. Let's say a registered user is allowed to post text with HTML tags inside but without an iframe. Only your individual group 'iframers' has the right to post iframes! These filters are active for content of the whole website.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 10 Templates The template is one of the most important pieces of a website. It provides the appearance, the design. It motivates new visitors to stay on your site and explore. Regular visitors and users appreciate being on a site with a beautiful and useful design. Think of other products, for instance. A car needs a good engine and tires but one of the most important reasons for buying one is often the design.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Red car (FotoSleuth CC BY-SA 2.052) Both of these cars are made for different target groups. They are an example of different approaches in design. Web design is somewhat like a handcraft. Possessing skills in techniques like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, image editing and many others is imperative. Joomla is only one more tool in your toolbox. A good template is not only about colors and graphics. The shape and positioning of the content is just as important.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Joomla front page POSITIONS You must know, of course, at which point you can assign modules at all. For this purpose, each template provides so-called positions. In order to see these positions you have to enable the Preview Module Positions switch (Extension - Template Manager - Options). After that, you can access your website by using the parameter tp=1 (http://localhost/index.php?tp=1). You'll see the emphasized module positions and their names (Figure 4).
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 5: Preview Icons CORE TEMPLATES Joomla core comes with three site templates and two administrator templates. You can see a preview in Extensions → Template Manager → Tab Templates (Figure 6). Figure 6: Site templates The Atomic template is an example of what a basic template looks like. In the chapter Create a New Template Using Atomic, we will use this template as a base to create our own template. The Beez5 template is the HTML 5 Version of Beez2.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 7: Admin templates STYLES Styles are a new feature since Joomla 1.6. They offer the possibility to create and use different versions of one template. A template has a minimum of one style. In this style, configurations can be made depending on the template, such as changing the colors or uploading the header logo. You may set the default style for your site in Extensions → Template Manager → Styles.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 8: Assign a style to a menu item You will find more on templates in the chapter Working with Templates.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 11 Navigation Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/62904109@N00/5214296452 CC BY 2.0 Every site needs an easy to understand navigation, otherwise it will not be possible for a user to find what he is looking for. This may sound simple but is not easily done. In a perfect world it should be possible to access any page on a website with two or three clicks.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide smaller than the primary navigation. It contains links like contact, about us and legal notices. The idea behind this is to have these links at the site but not at a very important position. As a general rule, do not put more than four to eight links in a navigation level. BREADCRUMBS A 'breadcrumb trail' is a navigation aid. The term comes from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel53 in the Brothers Grimm fairytale.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide FIRST EXAMPLE: A STATIC CATALOG OR BOOK STRUCTURE Sometimes you need a navigation for a book, a catalog or a guide. You'll find this configuration in the example data in the About Joomla menu. Let's say we're writing a short book consisting of three chapters. The navigation should be linked to all pages and look like figure 2. Figure 2: Static book structure Preparation Create a book structure with a few chapters.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Six 'book chapters' Step 1: Creating the menu You can use an already existing menu as your primary links or you can create a new one by accessing Menus → Menu Manager → Add new Menu and filling out the form (Figure 4). Figure 4: Add new menu Step 2: Creating the menu items Go to Menus → Primary links and add the six articles as links. Choose Single Article as Menu Item Type. Select the article and enter a Menu Title (Figure 5).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 5: Primary menu items Step 3: Creating and assigning the module This step is a bit tricky. You now have the articles, the menu and the menu items but you'll also need a module to position on your site. Let's go ahead and create one. Go to Extensions → Modules → New Module and fill in the form. In the Field Select Menu in Basic Settings, choose Primary links. Select Yes in the field Show Sub menu items (Figure 6).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 7: Select template position SECOND EXAMPLE: LINKING TO CATEGORIES (NEWS MAGAZINE) It is possible to link to a few pages like in the first example but what will you do if you have thousands of articles? The answer is easy in Joomla 1.7: Build a structure with categories, assign the articles and link it to a category layout.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • Category News → World = we want world news only and so on (Figure 8). Figure 8: Menu items in News menu To achieve the expected behavior, create a menu item with the type Category Blog. In Required settings, choose your newly created category News. In Blog Layout Options, choose Include Sub Categories - All and # Leading Articles = 0. Continue with creating nested menu items for each additional category and you're done (Figure 9).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 9: Category Options Now you can handle thousands of articles. Your navigation is prepared for that and your visitors will understand the system immediately (Figure 10). Figure 10: Articles in category structure Some tweaking As you have seen, there are nearly infinite possibilities of setting options. Many things are possible and there is usually a way to achieve your goals.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 12 Users and Permissions People simply try to use the Joomla website that you have created for them - in an active or passive way. The better the experience, the better the website will be perceived. Joomla - as every CMS differentiates between visitors and registered users with different permissions. Visitors usually arrive via search engines or social media site recommandations and can become users by registrating.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 1: User options On your Joomla site, you can create as many users as you would like. You can also allow visitors to register themselves. Depending on the their permissions, users can create their own content and/or view content that has been created for them in particular. User options The form has three tabs • Component In this area you are able to configure whether a registration is possible or not. One of the new features since Joomla 1.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Login module This module can be configured with many additonal features like customized text, SSL encryption and login / logout redirection. Have a closer look at Extensions - Module Manager (Figure 3). Figure 3: Login module options The advantage of the form, which is delivered by login module, is that there is no necessity for the user to click a link before the log in form appears.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 4: Menu item types for users Additional profile fields In the past it was only possible with additional extensions, to have additional fields in the registration form. To solve that issue and to connect the user data to the contact component, Joomla 2.5 core comes with a plug-in called User Profiles.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 5: Additional profile fields Tip: For better membership management functionality including extended registration form, additional profile and registration fields, membership approval workflows, profile tabs, etc. a membership management extension like e.g. Community Builder55 is needed. USER GROUPS The idea of a user group is to create sets of permissions. "If you want to be an author on our site, you'll need the following permissions.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 6: User groups The default setup is the same as it was for Joomla 1.5. If your are happy with the structure it is not necessary to change anything. Default permissions for website front end user groups • Registered group A registered user can log in, edit his own credentials and see parts of the site that non-registered users cannot see. • Author group The author can do everything that a registered user can.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 8: Groups assigned to an access level Why access levels? As we have seen, access levels are a bundle of groups. With the combination of group permissions and access levels it is possible to solve every use case. In an article e.g. you can limit the accessibility to an access level (Figure 9).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 9: Access levels in an article The new system is a big step forward for Joomla. Many users suffered from the lack of configurable groups, access level and permissions. Such functionality is needed in order to limit access to content and functions in large organizations or to support e-commerce and subscriptions based services use cases on Joomla websites.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 11: List of user notes MASS MAIL USERS Sometimes you want to send a message via email to all of your users. Sometimes you want to send that message only to a group of users or only to those having access to the backend. Sending emails is always a bit delicate.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 13 Extension Management There is a lot in the core package of Joomla. Words like components, modules, plug-ins, templates and languages you have already heard before. Besides these well known parts, Joomla also consists of lesser known parts like libraries and packages. Additional components, modules, plugins and languages are listet in the Joomla extension directory56. The Joomla project has no central place for templates und libraries.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 1: Table with all installed extensions In this area you can enable, disable and uninstall extensions. Enabling and disabling works just like a light switch. You simply switch the extension on and off, all the related data are still kept. If you unistall an extension, it will be deleted. Often extensions, usually components, create additional database tables while installing.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • phputf859 is a UTF-860-capable library of functions mirroring PHP's own string functions. You can get an idea what this library does by reading UTF-8 and PHP61. If you filter the list for packages, you will find nothing in Joomla core. If you installed a language other than English, you will find that language package there. UPDATING EXTENSIONS In this area, third-party extensions and the version of Joomla core itself are listed.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • Install from Directory If you have uploaded a zip file at your document root directory on your web server that contains a Joomla extension, you can use this option to extract and install your extension. • Install from URL If you know the URL of a zip file that contains a Joomla extension, you can use this option to download, extract and install your extension.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 14 Core Extensions As we have already seen in the extension manager, the Joomla 2.5 package consists of many built-in extensions. We have already come in touch with a few of them. As a website user, you probably don't care much about the extension you are using as long as you find that it is working. As an administrator, however, you have to know exactly what is going on.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide BANNERS The banner component provides the option to display advertising banners on your site. A banner can consist of graphics or custom HTML code. Every time your site is accessed, a different banner will be displayed from your banner administration. You can click on these banners and they are linked to the client's site. The banner component offers client, category, and banner administration as well as detailed analyses.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Standard web banner sizes62 I am free to choose the size of each banner but normally you will use the standard web banner sizes. (Figure 2) The client would like to have three banners in leaderboard size (728 x 90 pixels). I'll create them in Components - Banner - Banner. I choose the category and the client, upload the banner and fill in the size. In Publishing Options I can configure several options, e.g., the start and finish date for publishing the banner.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Adding banner form Figure 4: Banners in Administration The next step is to create and/or activate one or more banner modules. For each banner size I need one module. In my case, all the banners are the same size, so one module will suffice. I go to Extensions Modules and filter for Banners. At the moment there is nothing there, so I create a module by clicking the New icon. Depending on the template, I have to choose a position.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide feature is the possibility to write a header and/or footer text. In some countries advertisements have to be labeled (Figure 5). Figure 5: Banners module The banner will now appear on the website. Depending on the configuration and the amount of banners, a different banner will appear each time you refresh the page. The banner itself is linked to the client's website and if you move the mouse across the image, a tool tip with the banner title will be shown (Figure 6).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide If set correctly, all impressions and clicks of the banner will now be tracked by the banner component. These trackings can be viewed in Components - Tracks and filtered by date, client, category and type (clicks or impressions) (Figure 7).
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide CONTACTS Every website needs a contact form. Depending on the provider of the website sometimes you may need only one, sometimes more of these forms. If it is a website for a company with more than one department, they may want to have a contact form for every department. Perhaps you would like to display a contact form for every employee or every user account. All of this can be done by using the Joomla contact component.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 1: Contact area For this example, I have created two categories: cocoate and team. The team category is a sub category of cocoate. It would have been possible to add an image and a description but I have decided to fill the title field only (Figure 2). Figure 2: Contact categories For each contact form I need a contact with an email address. Contacts can be assigned to users or stand alone.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide MESSAGING Messages is a core component of Joomla and a built-in private messaging system for backend users. It allows you to send and receive messages to other users with permission to access the administrator area. The messaging component is very easy to use; however, users often forget the possibility to configure the component in Components - Messages - My Settings.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide NEWSFEEDS Feeds are very handy. It is possible to subscribe to different kind of news and information. Unfortunately even today, often people don't use them for some inexplicable reasons. Thirty years ago you had to buy and read a newspaper to get to know the 'News'. Fifteen years ago you opened your browser and visited one website after another to get to know the "News". Today, you can still do both but it's also possible to use a feed aggregator.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 1: A collection of newfeeds Finally, you have to create a menu item in a menu of your choice. The Newsfeeds component comes with three different layouts: 1. List of all News Feed Categories 2. List of News Feed in a Category 3. Just a Single Newsfeed I chose the second one because I have all my feeds in one category. On the website, Joomla aggregates my feeds, e.g.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: News feed data When you create a news feed, you can configure in Display Options among other things whether you want to display the feeds image or not. Also, you can limit the number of characters of the content which should be displayed. This feature is very useful if the feed contains longer articles or if you use the Feed Display module. You can create one in Extensions - Modules - New. Here is e.g. the New York Times feed (http://feeds.nytimes.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 4: News feed module on website Redirects The redirect manager is a wonderful idea. It redirects a visitor to a valid page when he enters a path on your website that doesn't exist. It is possible that it existed before and was added to the search index of a search engine, or someone stored it at another website. This problem usually occurs after relaunching a website. The redirect component is very convenient.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide You can now edit the links and add a new redirect URL. The next time the old path is accessed, the redirect component ensures that the visitor is redirected to the new address. You may create redirects on your own if you are aware of any old paths that no longer exist. The component uses the web server's rewrite system. You have to figure out which webserver you are using.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: .htaccess Afterwards, go to Global Configuration → Site → SEO Settings → Use URL rewriting and switch it to Yes (Figure 4).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide SEARCH People expect to be able to search content on your website. Joomla uses as the default setting full text search. Full text means that Joomla searches for all keywords you enter in the search box directly in the database. This may sound obvious to most people, but it isn't. Many search engines first create a search index consisting of words used on your website. During the actual search, the search index is browsed for matches.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Search module The search result page consists of a more detailed search form at the top of the page and the search results below (Figure 3).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Search result page The user can configure search settings (all keywords, any keywords, exact phrase) and change the order in which the results are displayed. The search can also be limited to different content items like articles and categories. Behind the scenes You are able to configure the search in the existing search plug-ins. Have a look at Extensions - Plug-in Manager and filter for type search (Figure 4).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide SMART SEARCH Smart Search is a new feature in Joomla 2.5. It adds a "smarter" search engine to the Joomla core which is more flexible and faster with autocompletion and the "did you mean" feature (stemming). Stemming? A stemmer for English, for example, should identify the string "cats" (and possibly "catlike", "catty" etc.) as based on the root "cat", and "stemmer", "stemming", "stemmed" as based on "stem".
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide INDEXING The content needs to be indexed in order to get the Smart Search to work. This is done automatically while saving content. The initial indexing can be done in Components -> Smart Search -> Indexing (Figure 2) Figure 2: Indexing CUSTOMIZING After activation and indexing you have to decide whether you want to use the Smart Search Module and/or a Search Link in the Navigation.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 3: Autocompletion Figure 4: Stemming You have several self explaining settings available to use predefined searches.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide WEBLINKS With the web links component, you can create a link list or a download section that you can integrate into your website. To do so, Joomla provides the nested categories system and counts the individual hits on the links. This component is useful for link catalogs. Add as many web link categories as you need, create as many web links as you have, then connect both by assigning categories. Add a menu link, choose a layout and configure the options.
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 15 Modules A module is a content element that can be positioned next to an article. A menu, for example, is a module. The small registration block on the left side is also a module. You can create as many modules with smart functions as you need and position them on the predefined area in the template. Modules are design elements in every template. Most of the time the search and the breadcrumb module have predefined positions in a template.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide The Joomla 2.5 package contains 24 different module types. I will list and shortly describe them in alphabetical order. (The descriptions are partly taken from the Joomla help). • We already used the Archived Articles module in the chapter Statuses, Trash and Check-Ins, which offers a list of months and is linked to the archived articles. • Articles Categories displays a list of categories from one parent category.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • The Latest Users module displays the latest registered users. You can link to the user profile, limit the amount of users and you may choose between different types of user information to be shown. • The Login module displays a username and password login form. It also displays a link to retrieve a forgotten password. If user registration is enabled (User Manager → Options), another link will be shown to enable self-registration for users.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 16 Plug-Ins A plug-in adds specific capabilities to a component. The term plug-in is also used in other places. For example, plug-ins are commonly used in web browsers to play videos. A well-known plug-in example is Adobe's Flash Player. A good example for the use of plug-ins in Joomla is the Search component. Five search plug-ins work together to find content from different Joomla components.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide GMail If you activate the GMail plug-in, users will be able to log onto your site by using their GMail address and password. Prior registration is not necessary. With the first login, the System plug-in Joomla will create a user account in its database. The GMail password is stored encrypted in the database, so your users GMail accounts cannot be hacked. This plug-in facilitates the login process for your users.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 2: Captcha Plug-in CONTENT Besides the Joomla content plug-in, all other content plug-ins are related to the text you insert into an article. The Custom HTML can use the content plug-ins as well (Figure 3).(Read more: Modules) Figure 3: Content Plug-ins Smart Search The plug-in enable the indexing of content. It is a feature since Joomla 2.5 and the base for the Joomla Smart Search Joomla The Joomla plug-in has two tasks: 1.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Loading Modules This plug-in loads the HTML output of all modules assigned to a template module position into an article. All you have to do is write {loadposition position-14} in the space where the modules should displayed. This feature is especially useful for putting banner ads into the content. Email Cloaking This plug-in transforms an email address entered into the content in the form of name@example.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Joomla core comes with two editors (Figure 4). In Global Configuration - Site you can set the default editor for your website. Additionally, you can assign a different editor to every user account (User Manager). Figure 4: Editor Plug-ins CodeMirror CodeMirror69 is a JavaScript library that can be used to create a relatively pleasant editor interface for code-like content ― computer programs, HTML markup, and the like.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 5: Editor-xtd Plug-ins Article Displays a button for linking the actual article to other existing articles. After clicking the button, a pop-up will be displayed allowing you to choose the article to link to. Image This plug-in displays a button for inserting images into an article. After clicking the button, a pop-up will open allowing you to choose an image from the media directory or upload new files and configure its properties.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide want to search additional components, the respective plug-ins for those have to be available as well (Figure 6). Figure 6: Smart Search Plug-ins QUICKICONS The plug-ins of this type are checking for updates for Joomla and for your installed third-party extensions and notifies you when you visit Site -> Control Panel. Figure: 7 Quickicons SEARCH The Search plug-ins for Contents, Weblinks, Contacts, Categories, and Newsfeeds can be activated when needed.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide want to search additional components, the respective plug-ins for those have to be available as well (Figure 8). Figure 8: Search Plug-ins SYSTEM System plug-ins are deeply integrated in the Joomla framework, and they usually affect the behavior of the entire website (Figure 9). Figure 9: System Plug-ins Language Filter This plug-in filters the displayed content depending on the language desired.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide P3P Policy The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) 71, is a protocol allowing websites to declare their intended use of information they collect about browsing users. The system P3P policy plug-in allows Joomla to send a customized string of P3P policy tags in the HTTP header. This is needed for the sessions to work properly with certain browsers, i.e. Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Cache This module provides page caching.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Logout The system logout plug-in enables Joomla to redirect the user to the home page if he chooses to logout while being on a protected access page. Language Code The Language Code plug-in provides the ability to change the language code in the generated HTML document to improve SEO. USER User plug-ins are related to user specific functions (Figure 10).
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Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 17 Working with Templates To be able to work with templates, you will not only need good design skills but also have an understanding of HTML and CSS. Some browsers, unfortunately, will not display the latest versions, which is why other versions are still quite common. The next challenge is the never ending discussion between developers and designers about 'how to do things the right way'.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 1: Individual template style My website now has a totally different look (Figure 2). It is possible to create different styles for different parts of the website using the menu assigment feature. Figure 2: Website with Beez2 style Creating different styles with available options is the easiest solution and often the best and fastest. When a Joomla update becomes available, your individual styles will still be accessible in the new version.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide CUSTOMIZING EXISTING TEMPLATES If you are reading this chapter, I assume you have already created a template style, figured out how to work with all of the available template options, but would still like to have more possibilities. Welcome to the world of HTML and CSS! I'll also assume that you know these two abbreviations. If not, have a look at wikipedia for HyperText Markup Language (HTML) 72 and Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) 73.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • Print view This template is responsible for the output when you access the print view. htdocs/templates/[template_name]/component.php More template pieces like the files for the core overrides are located in htdocs/templates/[template_name]/ html. The core overrides cannot be edited from the administrator backend. The changes you make here will change the core Beez2 files. This is something to keep in mind in case of updates.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide A better alternative would be to use template overrides in each template. Copy the changed file to your template folder to /httpdocs/templates/[template_name]/html/com_search/search/default.php and remove the changes in the original file. The result on the webpage is the same but, behind the scenes, you have overridden the original .../default.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Figure 6: Additional menu item types The creation of these files are no beginner's topic but I am sure third-party templates will soon make use of these new possibilities (Figure 7).
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide CREATE A NEW TEMPLATE USING ATOMIC The Atomic template is a skeleton for your own template. It consists of: • /htdocs/templates/atomic component.php - the print view template error.php - the error page template favicon.ico - the website icon (Favicon [5]) index.html - a security file displaying a blank page when the directory is entered directly (also has to be configured by the webserver but usually is) index.php - the templete main page templateDetails.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Joomla knows the values in baseurl as well as the name of your template and you can access them when needed. In line 46 you will see: echo $app->getCfg('sitename'); It will tell you the name of your site. In line 48 you will see: if($this->countModules('atomic-search')) ... It counts the amount of modules at the position atomic-search. It is used to adjust your layout to different situations.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Every page needs a head, sometimes a message (after saving) and, of course, a component. One component can be displayed per page. The component can make use of the module chrome as well. The error and the print view template files work exactly like the main template file. CSS Folder You will find three files in this folder. 1. The css/template.css file with predefined commented CSS commands. If you don't use the blueprint framework, you have to uncomment a few of them.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Chapter 18 Angie Radtke The Beez Template A template usually contains more than you see at first sight. The term template is usually connected with the visual appearance of a website. But in addition to the design, it is distinguished by the way of the technical implementation.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide • Configurable position of the navigation • WAI-ARIA Roles Landmark • Automatic representation of the modules in accessible tabs • Fade in and out of collapsible modules • Fade in and out of collapsible column • In beez_ 20 you can choose between two forms: natural or human • In beez 5 HTML5 is usable GENERAL ACCESSIBILITY For most people the Internet has become the norm.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide About a quarter of the population in working age complains of various degrees of ametropia. Later on, the percentage is much higher. Some of these problems can be compensated by glasses quite well, others with limitations only. Certain eye diseases such as cataract or glaucoma can be resolved or at least mitigated through surgery.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide As in beez 1.5 all those things that are necessary for the design of accessible templates are implemented also in beez_20 and beez5.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Today, this concept can be found not only in the templates, but in the entire Joomla Standard output. In the development of Joomla 1.6, this was a central part of the development work. Reasons were, in addition to better usability in assistive technologies, also search engine optimization and better usability in mobile devices. Well-structured code not only helps people with disabilities better navigate within a site, even Google feels better with such a well-structured site.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide If you convert to a layout into shades of gray, you gain an approximate idea of what colour-blind people can see. However, the perception is very individual and depending on the severity of different degrees of ametropia. Many colour-blind people, however, have learned during their life, what colours are represented by what they see. They know, for example, that grass is green, and they can identify by comparison and other shades of green.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide Would you like to change later only the colours of the template, you can simply modify the files personal.css or nature.css as desired. The positioning of the content remains the same, as they are defined in other files. All style templates are still arbitrarily modifiable and can be amended by template developers to include additional templates.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide JAVASCRIPT AND WAI ARIA WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a technical specification of the Web Accessibility Initiative75, which will facilitate the participation for people with disabilities in today's increasingly complex and interactive web services. This technique is particularly helpful in designing dynamic content presentations and user interfaces. The technique is based on the use of JavaScript, Ajax, HTML, and CSS.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide The activation and deactivation of certain areas can be helpful for the user, especially on pages with a lot of content. Both Beez templates provide two different ways. First, the column with additional information can be fully switched on and off, on the other hand, the modules can be collapsed up to their headlines. Hide Column To test this functionality, you have to place a module in the column for additional information.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide In the index.php of the template, around line 194, you will find the necessary HTML code.
The textual contents of the JavaScript variables are controlled with the Joomla language strings. Show and hide modules One of the biggest challenges in designing a website is the clear structuring of the content.Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide By using the style = "beezHide" all modules that are loaded at this position are shown as sliders. You may have noticed that the command includes the attribute “state”, which controls whether the module is expanded or collapsed. If you choose the value 0, it is closed when it first loads, select the value 1, it is opened by default and can be closed by the user. Accessible Tabs The presentation of content in so-called Tabs is becoming increasingly popular.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide In the top head of the layout the user is able to change the font size. The technical basis for this function can be found in the JavaScript file templates/your_name/JavaScript/md_stylechanger.js. Within the index.php you include a div container with id="fontsize". This area is initially empty and will then be filled dynamically with content using JavaScript. If your visitors should have turned off JavaScript, this function is not available.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide help you to assign more importance to the actual content. The HTML5 code in Beez5 uses only the elements that are reliable right now. Only the Internet Explorer Version 8 has some problems, as always. In the top of the page a script is inserted, which integrates the unknown elements in the existing document structure.
