How To Build A Site Using Joomla: Basic Guide

Posted in Featured Article on May 16th, 2011 |

Joomla (http://www.joomla.org) is a free based open source content management system that allows anyone to build full blown professional sites through to a simple blog.  It’s a php based platform that initially got going back in 2005 after many of the programmers from Mambo decided to jump ship and launch their own community.

Since then Joomla has exploded online with over 2.5 million downloads occurring just in its first year. In fact since 2007 that has now increased to over 21 million downloads.

Like WordPress Joomla has a thriving community that produces and creates plugins to extend the capability as well as help out people when they need questions answered.

Initially when I first look into Joomla I avoided it because I knew the learning curve was going to be quite extensive compared to a simple CMS like WordPress.  Yet I decided to motor on and dig into the documents that Joomla had released on how to build a site and I realized it wasn’t that bad at all. In fact it’s an extremely well organized cms that doesn’t require a person to know a lot about site building to get started. Like WordPress the basics of building a site using joomla can be broken down into sections like a filing cabinet.

So this tutorial will assume you have downloaded and installed Joomla* and you are now ready to build a site.

(*Some hosts provide extra support on Joomla and you don’t need to install everything manually, check Best Joomla Hosting.)

Joomla has a front end and a backend. The backend administration provides you with a number of choices but the main ones you need to know to begin building the site are…

Joomla Backend Administrator Area

Next, the Administrator area is where you will do most of your work, it is the area that is only seen by you the Super Administrator and anyone you setup as a user with administrator or manager privileges . Now you access your administrator area at www.yourdomain.com/administrator.

Now, don’t get overwhelmed by the number of options available, there is a learning curve with everything and not all of the options will you be using. Inside the administrator area, you can add, edit, delete, make visible content, modules and pretty much setup anything you need. Once you see me setup a template on this site, you will have a much better handle on finding your way around. Right now I just want to simply provide a very broad overview of the back end of a joomla website, and show you how to navigate around it.

Now this is based on 1.5, 1.6 has been released and the same rules apply to it. The only major difference with 1.6 is that it no longer requires sections.

Top Menu – Very similar to the front end, inside the administrator area at the top you have a bunch of menus: Site, Menus, Content, Components, Extensions, Tools and Help.

Control Panel – Pretty much everything you see up there is also visible and accessible on your main dashboard control panel area which is the first thing you see right in the center of the screen.

Options – Some helpful information here, like who’s logged in, and what articles are popular. Recent articles added by you or other contributors.

The Basic Menu

So let’s go through the Top Menu area and see what’s under them.

Site

• Control Panel – Like a home button, takes you back to control area
• User Manager – Add, Delete, manage users and privileges
• Media Manager – Add, Delete, Upload, Images
• Global Configuration – Site wide configuration area
• Logout – logout of backend

Menus

• Menu Manager – Add, Delete or edit menus
• Menu Trash – Delete or restore menus
• Main Menu – Main menu on site
• User Menu – Menu for registered users
• Top Menu – Top menu on site
• Resources – additional menu
• Example Pages – Examples
• Key Concepts – additional menu

Content

• Article Manager – Add, Delete, Edit and manage articles
• Article Trash – Delete and Restore articles
• Section Manager – Create sections
• Category Manager – Create categories
• Front page Manager – Deals with homepage content

Components

• Banner – Add, Delete and manager banner campaigns
• Contacts – view, edit, delete and manage site users
• Newfeeds – setup news feeds
• Polls – create, delete polls
• Search – view search statistics based on people searching
• Weblinks – Web link manager

Extensions

• Install/Uninstall – Where you install and uninstall anything
• Module Manager – Manage modules uploaded
• Plugin Manager – Manage plugins uploaded
• Template Manager – Manage templates installed
• Language Manager – Manager Site Language

Tools

• Read Messages – Read private messages
• Write Message – write private messages
• Mass Mail – mass mail all users
• Global Checkin – Unlocks all items that have been locked after editing
• Clean Cache – Cleans cache files from web server
• Purge Expired Cache – Cleans time set cached files that are expired

Help

• Joomla Help – Documentation for joomla
• System Info – Your web server information

Getting Started

Now that your familiar with the areas with the site, the process of creating pages requires you simply to create

• Sections
• Categories
• Articles

In 1.6 you no longer have to create sections, just categories and articles.

The same rules apply you just start by organizing your site with category names, then create articles that you place inside the categories.
You can setup to publish them immediately or set them to publish at a later date just like you can in WordPress. All images can be uploaded to the media manager, and then you can insert them into the articles. After you have categories and articles all you need to do next is create menus and assign those articles or categories to a menu and it will display on the front end.

Some screen caps on Joomla backend

You can view more on Joomla Demo.