Joomla 2.5 Beginner's Guide

Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. Although it's a fun and feature-rich tool, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that meets your needs perfectly. Using this book you can create dynamic, interactive web- sites that perfectly fit your needs.

Completely updated for Joomla! 2.5, this practical guide teaches you how to create professional, appealing and extendable websites, whether you want to create a full-featured company or club website or build a personal blog site.

The 'Joomla! Beginner's Guide' helps beginners to get started quickly and to get beyond the basics to take full advantage of Joomla!'s powerful features. Completely updated from the first book, real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, contemporary, feature-rich websites any developer can achieve with Joomla!. This book thoroughly covers the concepts behind the software and creates a coherent picture of how the software works. This book is not about what Joomla! can do - it's about what you can do using Joomla!.

Written with a fast-paced but friendly and engaging approach, this Packt Beginner's guide is designed to be placed alongside the computer as your guide and mentor. Step-by-step tutorials are bolstered by explanations of the reasoning behind what you are doing. You will quickly pick up the necessary skills, tips, and tricks for building a successful Joomla! website.

What you will learn from this book:
- Create a feature-rich site that's easy to expand, customize, and maintain without having to learn web languages such as HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- Design attractive home pages that provide a quick overview of the site's contents and direct people to the content they could be interested in
- Engage your web visitors and turn them into active users by enabling them to register, add content, and leave comments
- Design clear and easy navigation using menus, submenus, and text hyperlinks
- Make full use of templates to get your site to look just right, tweaking the CSS and customizing templates using your own logo, fonts, and colors
- Extend Joomla!'s capabilities by finding and utilizing must-have extensions that perfectly meet your needs
- Increase your site's visibility for search engines by applying highly effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques
- Secure your site from hackers and potential threats using easy-to-follow techniques

This book is written for beginners to website design. By the end of the book you will have built a complete custom content managed website, and be ready to build any kind of website.