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Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website
 

Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website
written by Barrie M. North
Studio : Prentice Hall PTR
by Prentice Hall PTR
Publisher : Prentice Hall PTR
Released : 2007-12-21
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780136135609
Avg. Customer Rating:(based on 35 reviews)

List Price : $44.99
Our Price : $28.15


Editorial Reviews for  'Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website'
 
Product Description

The First Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!-The World’s #1 Open Source Content Management System

 

If you want to build sophisticated websites that can be easily edited and updated, you need to master Joomla!-the world’s #1 open source content management system. Now there’s an easy-to-read, easy-to-use guide to Joomla! for every site manager, administrator, and developer. Leading Joomla! consultant Barrie North covers all you need to get results: installation, administration, site organization, template development, content updates, and a whole lot more. You’ll find never-before-published tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions, as well as three start-to-finish case studies.

 

New to Joomla? No problem! This book starts with the simplest design and system concepts, and builds your expertise step-by-step. You’ll rapidly master Joomla!’s power, even if you have no content management, scripting, or CSS expertise. Experienced with Joomla!? You’ll turn to this book constantly for its authoritative, plain-English, example-rich Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5 reference content.

 

·   Understanding content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together

·   Building Joomla! sites from scratch, and systematically customizing them to your needs

·   Organizing content with sections, categories, blogs, and tables

·   Creating dynamic pages and effective navigation

·   Working with Joomla! modules and components

·   Search engine optimization for Joomla! sites

·   Start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, an e-commerce site, and a blog

·   The most valuable Joomla! extensions and add-ons: finding them, and using them

·   Key differences between Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5, and what they mean to you



About the Website

The accompanying site for the Joomla 1.5 book, provides five fully functional Joomla! sites with live follow-along examples from the book and up-to-date information on Joomla! The site also includes


  • An active forum where you can ask questions specific to chapters from the book from a Joomla expert 
  • 5 fully functional Joomla 1.5 live follow-along examples from the book. You can browse the sites and their backends live online.
  • Downloads of 5 free websites for Joomla 1.5 based on various chapter of the book. These are SQL dumps you can import to instantly give you a completed Joomla site. 
  • 4 free tutorial templates and 3 free templates from joomlashack.com including the popular commercial template - JS Aqualine!
 
Customer Reviews for  'Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website'
 
A holistic approach
The focus of this book is on creating a successful website using Joomla, rather than explaining every setting and feature of Joomla itself. Whilst it does comprehensively cover many of Joomla's useful features, leading the novice confidently from basic principles to more advanced concepts, it goes beyond this and gives excellent advice on how to build various types of website (blogs, schools, restaurants) as well as organizing content, using stock images, creating custom template designs, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising, and more. Novices and more advanced users alike will benefit from the wealth of experience the author brings to this guide.
 
Could be much better!
1.) The book is based upon a release candidate and not the final release of Joomla 1.5.x which at times creates confusion.

2.) The illustrations in the book that you are supposed to refer to to make sure you are configuring things correctly are too small to make out without a powerful hand lens and thus about useless.

3.) The template for chapter 10 if you DL it from Joomla Shack is not the template that he uses. That alone cost me over 10 hours of frustration.

4.)Lastly the author refers you to his web site on many occasions and when you get there you can't find what he send you there for, just a lot of shameless self promotion and little substance.

5.)The book site is hard to find I was 3/4 through the book before I finally found it listed on the site mentioned in the book. Then when you finally get to the book site you have 2 levels of hoops to jump through to get the SQL data base for the site in chapter 10! Then when you get the DB the password is hidden on the from page of the site instead of in documentation. This cost me a few hours too.

6.) On page one of the book tech authors should have you register online so that they can email you up to date corrections to save you tons of wasted time.

This book reinforces my belief that there are 2 kinds of documentation(books) for software. Either there is NO documentation or there is POOR documentation. I think the whole paradigm has to change for tech books. Perhaps they should all be printed on demand or electronic with the user printing them so that they can updated continually.



 
Excellent Introduction to Joomla
If you are looking for a well written book about Joomla then this is the one. I read it from cover to cover except for one chapter. Joomla is a very powerful CMS engine, and because of that, the developers of this engine will always struggle to provide a simpler user interface and experience. In most cases simpler does really mean less powerful features. This book tries to bridge the gap, by making it simple to understand the powerful features of Joomla. Two of its final chapters are real projects that can be followed and you actually end up with decent websites.

Another reason why this book is such a good book is his recommendation for some of the commercial Joomla extensions that are available for Joomla. I made two purchases for two extensions after looking them up and comparing them against others. When I did that, I instinctively realized that this book is GOOD.
 
As the title says, user's guide to Joomla!
This book covers all the aspects of using Joomla! CMS. For new users (as me) it's a gude to manage, administer and build useful sites.
 
Joomla! A User's Guide Covers the Basics
This book covers most of the basics of how to set up a Joomla-powered website. Some of the concepts in Joomla are confusing or have misleading labels. Author Barrie North admits as much in several places throughout the book where he says something like "now here's the confusing part." Thankfully, by carefully reading the book and working along with the examples most of those confusing aspects of the software are elucidated.

However, where the book falls short is that it fails to clearly pull together all the disparate parts of the Joomla system into a coherent picture of how they work together to form the whole. The author does make an attempt at this and the text does provide some help in this regard. But I felt that there were still a few important gaps in my understanding by the time I finished reading the book. Fortunately, after about one more day of exploring the software on my own things started to gel for me. The book does give you all the basics but could tie things together better.

Finally, the quality of the writing is closer to what you might expect to find in a readme.txt file than in a book from a major publisher (Prentice Hall). I lost track of the number of times, the author uses the word "actually" -- a much overused word today. I'm not surprised to hear the word used gratuitously in conversation but I am disappointed to find this kind of writing in a book that lists for $45. And it's not just the colloquialisms that annoy. I found that the author's technical explanations were frequently perfunctory. When explaining a parameter it would be helpful to not simply state exactly what it controls but what its larger significance is or how it can be used. That sort of explanation is not always provided.

But, in spite of these complaints the book did serve as a useful tutorial that got me over the hump in understanding Joomla. Prior to ordering the book I had watched/read a number of free online tutorials but after a while I found that my understanding had plateaued at a low level. Searching for more tutorials to fill the gap became a time-wasting exercise. By working through this book I was able to reach a new plateau which should now allow me to confidently configure my own system.

 
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