Your site is created in one of the most powerful systems yet devised - Joomla! It is an open sourced development platform that is being used by small businesses to very large sites in both government and business, serving thousands of people per day.
Joomla is a very stable platform. You be assured that you are in great company now you have a Joomla site. Joomla is continually updated and runs on Linux Web Servers. Linux is by far the most commonly used web servers on the planet and growing. Read this article on the future of Linux servers.
Joomla and Linux are both open sourced develoment platforms. Linux is the operating system for a server, and Joomla is the framework on which a website is constructed.
Table of Contents
- Joomla - Overview
- Templates
- Content
- Functionality
Joomla - Overview
What Is Joomla
Joomla is a powerful and flexible CMS website application. CMS stands for “Content Management System”. A CMS contains all its structure and content in a database and in Joomla this is a mySQL database. The CMS relies on some supporting files to interact with the database, the most important of which is the website template or set of templates.
Joomla was made public in 2005. I followed the development waiting for the first release and eagerly installed it on my local server when it became available. I have never had a reason not to use Joomla due to its flexibility, power and usability.
Comprises Of 3 Components
A website comprises of three components which are; content, graphics and functionality.
The advantage of Joomla is the way it interacts with these components. all components are separate, but are able to be combined on a page to bring powerful and flexible displays and capture of information.
In joomla the content is contained in a database that can be displayed on any page with other content or by itself. Content can be displayed in total or an introduction to the content.
Templates
A Joomla website can have many templates but it is best to keep to one unless you have a very good reason as future maintenance is made much more difficult with every template added.
Thankfully one template can be used for a site that has many zones called module positions. These are collapsible or fixed. They can therefore occupy space when used or unused or completely disappear when not used and automatically appear when they are used to display some information or for interaction with the user of the site.
Content
Content
The most important part of a website is to convey information.
True this is enhanced by graphics, database structure, template creativity, and functionality; but the most critical part is your message regarding services and products that you provide. Why, would the reader be interested in you.
Content is King!
Unfortunately only you know your business and therefore this must spring forth from your mind.
The website designers job is to present this message in the most logical and aesthetic design to convey the image of your business that you desire. A website designer assists with the type of information that is required, and can provide article writing services at an extra cost, but still the source is from the business owner or in a larger organisation, from a person or team of people that have been given the task.
So how is content placed into a Joomla website?
Categories
When a website project is commenced, a website designer will gather together all the content (or a synopsis of the content if the article is yet to be written) and design a organised structure to contain the content.
They will be placed into what we call categories which can contain content and/or further categories. In this way a hierarchical structure of content is created.
The more content the greater care and more complex this structure will become.
When adding a new article, it is important to consider where it will be displayed. If the article is not similar to other content already on the site then a new category needs to be created.
Is this new category a brand new topic or is it a subset of another larger category?
When discussing menu structure the importance of this step, wil become obvious.
Articles
This is the actual written content comprising of only text. Links can be placed to plugins or hyper-links to other pages on your website or any website in the world that you have access to.
You enter text either in pure HTML or by way of a text editor which is itself a plugin program. The best is JCE which is free to use on any website and is well supported by the developer. As with all editors it’s stability will depend on the server you have the website, connection stability and speed, the version of Joomla you have installed.
JCE has similar controls to Word as it is a word processor. Common functions such as Bold, Italic, Undo, Hyperlinks, etc are available through push buttons above the text area.
Every article is written or copied to the editor and after some formatting edits is saved.
You have a choice to how you want the article to appear on your website.
JCE
Styles
Yet to be written
Publishing Articles
Articles can be edited at any time but once you save it is public on your site. An article can initially be unpublished but saved. At any time an article can be unpublished or published, and you can even make an article published between certain dates.
Read More…
There is a special formatting available in Joomla that provides the ability to show a paragraph or a sentence to introduce the articles content.
This is called Read More.
It saves space and allows the reader to quickly glance over a number of articles to find what they are interested in. They click Read More and the full article is presented on it’s own page to provide distraction free reading. Note all modules under the menu will still appear.
Advantages are;
- Saves on screen space
- Allows the Reader to skim read a number of articles.
- You can group all related articles together (ie: Category)
- Can provide an feature articles list on the frontpageArticle Tips
Personally I only use the editor for small edits. I prefer to use markdown which is another editor consisting of entirely text with #,*,+,- being used to provide special formatting. This is beyond the scope of this training session but can be investigated, by a Google search.
When creating articles I suggest that you do not use Word, as it contains special unseen characters that will provide puzzling results. Even though you can paste into JCE directly from Word, I do not recommend it.
Why do I use Markdown instead of HTML? Ever tried reading HTML?
Using markdown I can quickly write adding formatting by typing natural characters on the keyboard. They do not have a dominant effect over the text as does HTML.Tab And Slides Controls
A new feature in Joomla articles is a tabs or slides control.
These are available through a special formatting such as the Read More format.
An article can be split up under Tabs with titles, showing the content on the screen when a Tab is pressed. a reader will only see the current Tab’s information.
A Slider has similar functionality except the text appears to hide underneath the title and slide below the heading when pressed, allowing it to be read. Once again only the active Slider is able to be read.
Why would we use these controls? Although it is cool to look at, it can be frustrating to the reader if used inappropriately.
They are invaluable, for;
- Display information in a small screen space without the reader having to find menu buttons to proceed to the next screen
- Provide a step by step approach to an article.
- Allows the reader to display the information they want quickly without having to scroll down the page.
- Quickly allows the reader to find what they want otherwise they might leave your site.The greatest reason is to prevent scrolling. People who visit your site do not have time to waste. Instead of scrolling down a page if they do not find the information they want at first glance they move on. Although I personally find that this is a questionable approach and can actually waste more time, that is the way most people, use websites, so we must provide for this approach.
Personally, to have such a control on the website page is highly advantageous in spreading up the reading process, but we must name the Tabs or Sliders well to provide an insight to what the article hides within.
Functionality
Functionality
Functionality is very important to a website; program’s written in languages such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and many others provide this functionality. PHP and Java is the most used languages but all are better for specific purposes than the other, so it depends what you wish to accomplish by the program or which the developer is the most comfortable in using.
Adding functionality to a website is essential today and is expected by the users of the website, examples are;
- Allowing for feedback,
- Showing galleries and slideshows,
- Displaying of information from other sources,
- Simple things such as showing a clock
- Sophisticated functions like a booking service or shopping carts with credit card transactions.
- Satellite navigationWhen the first websites were made they were essentially information. Sites that had no functionality at all. As time went by new things were added on the web to what we have today. Joomla has always had functionality built in, with many simple functions.
But Joomla has a trick which makes it one of the most powerful web development platforms that has yet been developed.
Joomla can also use third party programs or those written by yourself to add functionality to the site.
But where do these functions exist in Joomla and how are they displayed and called to do their magic.
Programs exist in files within Joomla. They are not stored in the database. The database is for content and structure, not functionality or graphic components.
Three Types of Functions
There are three ways that a function gets called in Joomla.
They are called either components, modules or plugins.
To best illustrate the difference lets use a slideshow as an example.
Plug Ins
Plugins display in the Middle of an Article
We wish to display a slideshow in the middle of some text to illustrate what we are writing about. It comprises of a step by step approach that requires 3 graphics (graphics can be illustrations, photos or graphs - they are just a file that is either in JPG, PNG, BMP, GIFF or TIFF format).As the user is reading the information we are reinforcing the steps with the graphics.
To display this we must call a function from within the articles text. We do this by a simple code, and a program to specifically display the slideshow called a plugin.
The plugin may refer to a module or component if more sophisticated programming is required, but it will still be displayed in the article.
Modules
Display as a standalone Slideshow unrelated to the article on the screen.
Remember that in Joomla, you can have flexible templates. These templates can have many module positions. A module is a program that is displayed inside a module position.To find the modules used on any Joomla page just place /?tp=1 at the end of the URL. ie: netrapt.com/?tp=1
Therefore we just have to say what module position that we want a program (in this case a slideshow) to be displayed. Joomla allows us to also define when we want it displayed, that is what menu or menus that we want it show. We can also define on every menu, or just not on a these menus.
Components
This is the most powerful of all functionality.
Components are made as they are too complex to exist in a plugin or module.
They may also have modules and plugins that also must be installed that help with the operation of the program.Joomla itself consists have many components that provide the functionality.
Getting back to our Slideshow example, we may require some text or an article to be shown with the slideshow. Instead of showing the slideshow within the article as we did with the plugin, we want to show the article within the slideshow. This is to be displayed in a module position or just called directly by a menu.
If called directly by a menu you do not need a module position defined. Note that the module positions already associated with the menu will be displayed as well.
So with our slideshow we can display it however we like. It just depends on the purpose of our slideshow, or what is the best way to impact and convey our message to our readers.
