Product Description

In Detail

Joomla! started as a fork from Mambo in 2005, when many of the original developers of the Mambo CMS moved to working on Joomla! It has rapidly grown in popularity and, according to its own description, is a "Cutting Edge Content Management System and one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management systems in the world. It is used world-wide for anything from simple homepages to complicated corporate websites. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable."

While the Joomla! CMS has the flexibility and power needed for complex, full-featured web applications, it is also simple to use to create basic websites. Its powerful, extensible template system can deal many different data types and control of user access, approval of content, scheduling of content display, and rich administrative controls are all included.

Approach

This book takes the reader through the tasks essential to create a Joomla! website as rapidly as possible. The necessary tasks are explained with clear step-by-step instructions. The author's chatty and engaging style makes this book very readable.

Who this book is written for?

This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors, and marketing professionals who want to develop a website in a simple and straightforward process. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT-confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive website.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #68518 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-28
• Released on: 2008-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
Hagen Graf

Hagen Graf was born in July 1964. Born and raised in Lower Saxony, Germany, his first contact with a computer was in the late seventies with a Radioshack TRS 80. As a salesperson, he organized his customers' data by programming suitable applications. This gave him a big advantage over other salesmen. With the intention of honing his skills, he joined evening courses in programming and became a programmer. Nowadays he works in his wife's consulting company as a trainer, consultant, and programmer. Hagen Graf has published other books in German, about the Apache web server, about security problems in Windows XP, about Mambo, and about Drupal. Since 2001, he has been engaged in a nonprofit e-learning community called "machm-it.org e.V.", as well as in several national and international projects. All the projects are related to content management, community building, and harnessing the power of social software like wikis and weblogs. He chose Joomla! CMS because of its simplicity and easy-to-use administration. You can access and comment on his blog.

Customer Reviews

If you want the basics...
Get this book, but don't expect much more. The first half of the book is a complete snore if you have done any web development in the past, this includes HTML as it is completely non-technical. This book also introduces somthing that I haven't seen in a technical text in a while and that would be an editorial piece. Maybe I'm light on open source reading but I don't really care so much about someone's opinion on why companies that do not share the authors opinion are selfish and only open source developers go to heaven.

It might not be that extreme, but it really has no place in a technical / educational text. If I want those opinions I'll buy a different book, I'm just trying to learn a bit about the software.

If you want the technical approach, order the WROX book. Does a much better job from the get go digging into the technical aspects of the project and leaves the ego stroking to others.

Good Reference, Weaker Tutorial
Packt Publishing sent me a complimentary copy of "Building Website with Joomla! 1.5" by Hagen Graf to review. I specifically was interested in this book as I was researching the use of Joomla! as part of redoing an elementary school website.

First off, the book was well organized. It begins with an introduction to web content management systems and the role they play today in web sites, covers a brief history of Joomla!, and then focuses the rest of the book on the installation and configuration options. As a first time Joomla! user, I can definitely say that the book helped me out quite a bit in understanding the way things were configured. Chapters 4 through 12 focus on different areas of Joomla!, including menus, extensions, components, and content in sufficient detail to make a useful reference but in a way that a first time user can get through the configuration. As a reference, this is the book's strong point.

Where I was a bit disappointed was that I was look more for a tutorial, rather than a pure reference book. Given that I was setting up a new site using Joomla! for the first time, I was hoping for an extended step by step approach that would take me through a complete site development. While there is a chapter in the book called "A Website with Joomla!," it was only 12 pages long and was presented more in the context of a demonstration than a tutorial.

Overall, I was pleased with the book. I think it will be a useful reference as I develop the site, but I also think I've still got more work ahead of me to get the site out the door.

Great Tutorial Book
What a great book for beginners of the web world. Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 really is quite helpful in setting up and maintaining a website built on the popular framework.

The book has very well documented, with images, the Joomla! experience. Each chapter covers new topics to help you setup, edit, and maintain your site, and the content on the site.

The later chapters are helpful, and will whet your appetite for more if you are a programmer.


Beginners will be quite satisfied with this book, as it details in very easy to follow steps exactly how to get your site up, and working, and how to easily maintain and edit the site.