Kramer - Joomla! start to finish how to plan, execute, and maintain your web site

Joomla! Start to Finish

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Copyright 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-470-57089-0

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For all my students:

It depends.

Done is better than perfect.

Just because you can, doesnt mean you should.

You know more than you think you do.

About the Author

Jen Kramer has been educating clients, colleagues, friends, and students about the meaning of a quality web site for more than nine years. She is the president of 4Web, Inc., a web design and development firm creating highly customized Joomla web sites.

Jen is a senior faculty member at the Marlboro College Graduate School, teaching courses and workshops in web site design and management, including Joomla. She is the Program Director for the Masters of Science in Internet Technologies program (MSIT), advising students and overseeing courses and faculty pertaining to the degree. She also teaches Joomla at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. She has also previously taught at Champlain College and the Community College of Vermont.

Jen is a Lynda.com author for the titles Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates , Joomla! Advanced CSS, Website Strategy and Planning , and Preparing CMS Web Graphics and Layouts Using Open Source Tools .

Jen earned a BS in biology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MS in Internet Strategy Management at the Marlboro College Graduate School. She is the manager for the Joomla! User Group New England and a past manager of the New England Adobe User Group.

About the Technical Editor

Bill Tomczak wrote his first FORTRAN program in 1970. Since then, he has worked with computers and technology in a wide-ranging variety of roles. He was introduced to Joomla in 2006, and now works almost entirely on writing custom extensions and providing technical support for Joomla.

Credits

Executive Editor

Carol Long

Project Editor

John Sleeva

Technical Editor

Bill Tomczak

Production Editor

Rebecca Anderson

Copy Editor

Paula Lowell

Editorial Director

Robyn B. Siesky

Editorial Manager

Mary Beth Wakefield

Associate Director of Marketing

David Mayhew

Production Manager

Tim Tate

Vice President and Executive Group Publisher

Richard Swadley

Vice President and Executive Publisher

Barry Pruett

Associate Publisher

Jim Minatel

Project Coordinator, Cover

Lynsey Stanford

Compositor

Craig J. Woods, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Proofreaders

Sheilah Ledwidge and Jen Larsen, Word One

Indexer

Robert Swanson

Cover Image

Allan Baxter/Photographers Choice RF/Getty

Cover Designer

Michael E. Trent

Acknowledgments

Thank you to John Sleeva and Paula Lowell for their tireless editing of the manuscript. You did so much to improve it!

Thanks to Carol Long and everyone at Wrox and Wiley for giving me the opportunity to write the book I wanted.

Thanks to the Marlboro College Graduate School in Brattleboro, Vermont, for teaching me to think strategically about web sites and teaching how to learn new technologies effectively.

Thanks to the Joomla! User Group New England for all their support. We now have two authors in our group! How cool is that?

Most of all, many thanks to my longtime friend and engineer Bill Tomczak, for technically editing the book, learning Joomla with me over these last four years, and for generally putting up with my need to be in charge. Designers and developers can indeed be friends!

Introduction

I entered the web world in 2000, back when we built web sites in Macromedia Dreamweaver 3, made our navigation buttons as JavaScript-based image rollovers, used tables for layout, and used the font tag and spacer GIF images quite liberally throughout our sites.

In those days, weekend web masters would buy a copy of Microsoft FrontPage on a Friday night, spend the weekend learning the software and configuring their web host, and by Monday morning, they were hanging out their shingle as a web professional.

In 2009, our weekend web masters are now Saturday web masters. Call up a hosting company, get them to buy a domain name for you and set up an open source content management system like Joomla, click a few buttons, and youve got a web site up in a day or less. Whats more, you dont need to know any HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, what a web application is, or even what FTP is.