CMS Magazine: Beginning Joomla from Novice to Professional Book Reviewed : Mobile Edition

Published on 2008-01-31 23:07:50

I have been using Joomla for many years and definitely impressed by its quality as Open Source CMS solution, its features and the ability to extend it using components and modules. If you are looking to get started with Joomla or for a good reference to explore the capabilities of this great CMS, you should get your hands on "Beginning Joomla from Novice to professional". The book is written by Dan Rahmel and published by Apress publishing. In 13 chapters and about 450 pages, Beginning Joomla provides the necessary knowledge to build and manage personal homepages, user communities, and corporate websites.

Introduction to Joomla!

The book starts with a brief introduction to content management systems and Joomla! Talking about the project history and how it forked from Mambo, then its features and how Joomla system works. Briefly, but I think it's necessary to get to know the project better. Finally the author pointed to differences between Joomla 1.0 and 1.5, where features have been boosted but compatibility have been broken for plugins between 1.0, 1.5 and mambo.

Quickstart: Setting up a Joomla site in 20 minutes

The second chapter, as its title indicates, dive you directly into Joomla world from the installer. The chapter explains how to install Joomla and make it working in 20 minutes, but I'm sure that before you finish the book you will be able to install it in less than one minute. There are issues very confusing with the installation especially for newbie's, so if you are new to Joomla management interface be sure to install the sample data. Many ignored since it's optional and the book just mentioned briefly in a screenshot.

Now that you have Joomla installed and working correctly, the book give you an introduction to be more familiar with the management interface: Adding articles, managing menus, personalize the logo, and different components in place. This is probably the end of the novice part of the book and you will see in next chapters more intermediate and advanced topics.

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