Joomla! 2.5: Beginner’s Guide

Book Description

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!.

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

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CMS Comparison: Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress

All three are open-source software, each developed and maintained by a community of thousands. Not only are all three free to download and use, but the open-source format means that the platform is continuously being improved to support new Internet technologies. 

 There’s no one-size-fits-all solution here; it depends on your goals, technical expertise, budget and what you need your site to do. For a simple blog or brochure-type site, Wordpress could be the best choice (while very friendly for non-developers, it’s a flexible platform also capable of very complex sites). For a complex, highly customized site requiring scalability and complex content organization, Drupal might be the best choice. For something in between that has an easier learning curve, Joomla may be the answer. for more..

Drupal vs Joomla

Drupal v Joomla The CMS Comparison

Here's a Drupal - Joomla shootout based on a feature matrix, lower down the page. We don't normally do this as you also need to explain the numbers, so it's not a foolproof system - it always needs the explanations. In addition you really need to compare like with like, otherwise the result can be meaningless.

10 Reasons to Use Drupal

If you are interested in developing search engine friendly Web sites with a content management system, you should be taking a close look at the open-source Drupal CMS. 
Here are 10 reasons why you should seriously be considering Drupal for your SEO-based Web development projects.

1. Advanced URL Control
2. Custom Content Types and Views
3. Revision Control
4. Taxonomy
5. User Management
6. Page Titles and Meta Tags
7. Excellent Documentation
8. PHP Template
9. Drupal Cookbooks
10. Large and Friendly Community

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