Joomla newbie

The webheads in the audience will have worked out that I have changed wanderjahre.co.uk from it's old HTML coded and hope-for-the-best to a new all singing, all dancing CMS website powered by Joomla.

I confess to being a CMS noob and a Joomla noob at the same time but I thought a few newbie thoughts might come in handy for anyone else who is thinking of getting themselves Joomla'd up!

Content Management System.
First off then, what is Joomla? Well its a Content Management System (CMS) which is essentially a database (MySQL) and is a way of managing all the little bits that make up a website. The CMS links the menus and articles (webpages) together. It also forced some articles to behave in certain ways using HTML and CSS - blog pages to appear one on top of the other and archives articles to be accessible in some of the site only. Joomla experts will be able to add a lot more to that list and there dozens of ways that information can be displayed on the page. I just have to learn them! Because it's all kept nice and tidy in a database, searching is built in a pretty simple with all the usual search options.

Template.
A Joomla website starts with a template and its here that the newbie will find their first problem. Although on the face of it, there are loads of freebie templates that you can use, chances are you will find that no one template meets your needs, especially in terms of getting the name of your site where you need it. Some will not let you change the logo from within Joomla and in other you may be able to change the text but only in a very limited way. It took me a while to find an answer to this that didn't involve fiddly alterations to the CSS.

Changing the banner image.
What I am planning to do is find the template I need - with the positions I need (see below) and then identify the main logo. The template comes in a .zip file but pulling what I need out and using Photoshop or similar to amend the log should not be difficult. Return the image file to the zip and upload via Joomla's template system to my website and Robert is your relative!

Positioning.
I touched on the positions issue in the last paragraph. Each template is constructed with a number of pre-set positions; left, right, upper, middle. Each position is a place on the site where you can place a module. More on those later. If you are looking for a freebie it means ploughing your way through numerous templates until you find one with the positions you need. I understand there are template creators out there and one of those could be my next point of call. For myself I settle for one that offer left and right positions and a menu which would tuck itself nicely under the logo. At a later date I may be able to improve on this.

Articles.
OK so we have a template we like with positions on it that we can live with, what next? You fire up a copy of Word or Open Office or a HTML editor like Kompozer, if you prefer to work that way and start writing. This was where I went wrong. I assumed that you would need to set up some kind of framework for the site. This is the way I had worked in pure HTML but in Joomla you link each menu item to an article. If you create the menu but don't have the articles then you can't link the two and the menu won't appear on the site.

I got round this my creating a single article with a few words of text and then linked each and every menu to the same article. This meant I could at leaast see how the site would look more or less. In time I hope to be a bit more Joomla like but for now this works for me.

Modules.
Joomla has some clever little fellers called "modules" these allow you do have some professional looking features on your site with little or no effort. The menu module is simple enough, although some others seem to need a little more work. Some module support custom HTML others operate as RSS links and can be used for social networks.

Conclusions.
By Joomla standards this is little more than a quick scratch of the surface and I don't claim any expertise, but I have been learning and I like what I see. The ability to overhaul the entire site by simply claiming a template or simply to change one page by using a different template along with the ability to rapidly change just about any component makes it an incredibly useful tool. Joomla is professional and well worth the time to mould it into shape.

More on this as I get more used to it...

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