Tuesday, August 11, 2009
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Joomla (we’re dropping the final exclamation point from Joomla! in the text of this book, following the convention in other books and makingthis book more readable) gives you total control of your Web site — the layout, the navigation menus, the text, everything. And this book gives you total control of Joomla. Today, users are demanding more from Web sites. It’s not enough to have static text on your Web site — not if you want a steady stream of visitors.
You’ve got to update your pages continually, making your site fresh and keeping it new. You’ve got to have an attractively, professionally formatted site. You’ve got to have tons of extras: polls and e-mail signups and newsflashes and menus, and more.
Who can afford the time to maintain a site like that and write the content too?
Now you can. Content management systems (CMSes) like Joomla are coming to the rescue, letting people put together spectacular sites with very little work.Want to publish a new article on your site? No problem. Want to let users rate your articles with a clickable bar of stars? Also no problem. Want to link your articles with a cool system of drop-down menus? No trouble. Want to let people log into your site to gain special privileges? No worries. Want to let users search every page on your site? Yep — no problem at all. CMSes are all the rage on the Internet these days: They give you the complete framework of a Web site and allow you to manage it professionally with a few clicks. All you have to do is provide the content — such as text, images, and videos — that you want to display. Using a CMS is as easy as typing in a word processor (in fact, one way to think of CMSes is as word processors for the
Web) but a lot more fun.
The CMS of choice these days is Joomla, which is what this book is all about.
Joomla is free and dramatically powerful. Want a site that looks as though a Fortune 500 company is behind it? Coming right up in just a few minutes. You’re going to find that Joomla is not only free but also remarkably trouble free. In the old days, you had to build your own site from scratch using HTML. These days, Joomla takes care of all the details for you, allowing you to concentrate on the content of your site instead of struggling with the details of how that content is presented.
Welcome to the new era.
About author:
Steven Holzner is the award-winning author of more than 100 tech books, with more than 3 million copies sold in 18 languages. He’s written ten For Dummies books and many computer-book bestsellers. He’s written on nearly every Web topic (including JavaServer Pages, PHP, HTML, and XML), and he specializes in topics such as Web-site design. He earned his PhD at Cornell University, and he’s been a faculty member at Cornell University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He used to design Web sites from scratch but uses Joomla! now.
