Beginning Joomla from Novice to Professional Book Reviewed
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.
Installation and configuration
Chapter three should be introduced before the second chapter, because here you will learn how to prepare the necessary environment in details to install Joomla on it. You will find how to install XAMPP, and others WAMP/LAMP/MAMP combinations. In the end you will find answers to most commonly encountered problems, depending on your level you might find these useful.
Adding content
I remember in the beginning when I was using Mambo, I didn't easily find how to add and manage my content. This fourth chapter is definitely very helpful to prepare and add your content, and of course understand Joomla mechanism to organize your articles, media files, and menus. Best thing in this chapter is how to plan your site using tools like Word, FreeMind or Leo.
Administering Joomla
Step into the administration panel, in chapter five you will discover different aspect of the CMS administration: Content, Template, Language, System configuration, Users, Menus, Modules, Plugins, Email ... You will find security tips in the end to keep your Joomla installation safe.
Creating your own templates
While I think this is the designer job, it is still useful to learn how to convert a design into a Joomla template. I don't recommend creating your logo in MsPaint, or your HTML in Frontpage, not even playing with css, but it is interesting to know all these to create your own template if you are webdesigner, to help converting design into Joomla template, or simply to perform small changes in your template when needed.
Joomla! Extensions
In chapter seven you will learn how to extend Joomla! features using Modules, Components and plugins. You will also understand the difference between them and install some of the most common and useful ones. You can find tons of Joomla extensions free or commercial to create almost any functionality you want. you will see later how to create your own extensions.
Web community features
Chapter eight introduce to the community features in Joomla! : user's profiles, newsfeed, rating, polls, suggestion box, guestbook, comments, calendar, wiki and forum. All these functionalities are available via Joomla! core, or using extensions, or bridges (the case of SMF forum). It is something interesting to know so you can spend more time on design personalization, so new features fit very well inside your website and don't break your design layout.
Site Statistics
It's interesting to know about your website statistics, but here I blame the author first for talking about stats at this level, and secondly for not talking about SEO with it. Personally I recommend you not using Joomla! internal statistics (better to disable it), because it will slow down your site, and recommend you to use Analytics: it's free, fast and can give you all the information you need about your website and visitors.
Photo Gallery
In chapter ten the author introduces two photo gallery solutions: Easy Gallery and Gallery2. I don't know why these are in a separate chapter, but anyway it's two useful solutions for small and large sites who are interested into selling photos. Next chapter is more advanced in e-commerce and how to sell your goods on Joomla!
Joomla! E-commerce
Section eleven is all about VirtueMart, a very popular Joomla! extension to create your own e-commerce website. You will learn here how to install and manage your store easily. There is a lot of development around VirtueMart, and new feature include more and more functionalities. Ez-catalog and osCommerce include more features if VirtueMart is not enough.
Search Engine Optimization and Joomla!
The chapter twelve is very informative on SEO, Joomla!, and SEF extension, but didn't mention any sitemap.xml generator while I think there are many. As I have mentioned before, it will be more useful if this chapter was better developed with statistics. So you can monitor the result of your SEO work. SEO require also a permanent work and monitoring, you will get the basics here, many companies provide a professional SEO service if you don't have much time for it and want a better results.
Creating extensions
Chapter thirteen, and last chapter is the most advanced chapter in the book about creating your own Joomla! extensions. What's really amazing in Joomla! and PHP, that many people have written Joomla! extensions for the first time without any knowledge of PHP. The author here gives you only the basics of Joomla extensions, general structure, and xml description file... In this chapter you will learn how to create three different types of extensions : front-end module, administrator module, and a component. You can learn from already written Joomla! modules and extensions, and of course be sure to ask your best friend while coding : the PHP Manual.
Overall, the book is a good reference for those looking to create advanced websites using Joomla!. You can almost create any kind of website with Joomla, but to explore the capabilities of this great CMS you have to get started today if you didn't already.
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