Joomla (the exclamation point Joomla! won’t be used in the text of this
book, for the sake of making it more readable,) gives you total control of
your Web site — the layout, the navigation menus, the text, everything. In
turn, 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 allow
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? Joomla’s got you covered.
Interested in allowing people to log into your site to gain special privileges?
You can do that too. Have you wanted 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? With Joomla, you can whip one up in
no time at all. You’re going to find that not only is Joomla free but it’s also
remarkably trouble free.
In the old days, you had to build your own site from scratch using HTML.
Now, 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 of web publishing.
