Ron Severdia - Using Joomla: Building Powerful and Efficient Web Sites

For any organization, a web presence is shifting from a marketing accessory to being a principle way to increase awareness and interaction with the public. Four years ago, no one could have known how explosive the success of the Joomla Project would be. Today, Joomla is a vibrant and growing platform with a multimillion-dollar economy and a full range of hobbyist to professional developers. Over 12 million downloads in the last two and a half years alone, hundreds of thousands of registered users on our forums, and thousands of professionals who make their living working with Joomla every day all tell a compelling story of how well Joomla can help you.

Using Joomla to build your web presence gives you an immediate head start by surrounding yourself with a strong, passionate, and caring community of users. The Joomla community is broad and diverse, and members are always working to help each other. It is both humbling and empowering to be part of a group so committed to helping one another and improving Joomla so that anyone can have a voice on the World Wide Web. In this book, two of the most able and committed people in the Joomla community will guide you through the steps to get your website running on Joomla. I have had the honor of calling both Ron and Ken friends and colleagues for a number of years now and couldnt be happier they have decided to share their expertise with you via this book.

Joomla as a platform can be used to build anything for the Web. There are certainly specific things it excels at, but dont let anyone tell you that Joomla cannot be used for your website because it lacks one thing or another. Flexibility is one of our key values and it is built into the software we produce. There are thousands of prepackaged extensions available in our extensions directory (http://extensions.joomla.org), which expand Joomlas capabilities in countless ways. In one of the best sections of this book, Ron and Ken explore some common needs and the more popular extensions that help fill those needs.

As you navigate the world of Joomla, please remember that its community is always there to help. If you are interested, there are always people willing to help you learn. The number of people asking and answering questions in our forums (which you can find at http://forum.joomla.org) every day is staggering. No matter what problems you may encounter that you cannot tackle yourself, rest assured, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people in our community willing to help you help yourself. Additionally, Joomla User Groups exist all over the globe, and finding help from the community could be as simple as locating your closest group and spending a few hours getting to know Joomla users in your area.

Some of you wont be interested in getting your hands dirty and we understand that. There are businesses all over the world specializing in everything from building custom extensions to designing templates to meet your needs. Finding a company or consultant to help you make your website dreams a reality could be as simple as visiting our resource directory (http://resources.joomla.org). There is no shortage of products and services to make your website better, and we have a strong community of professionals around Joomla that can help you get the most out of your experience.

Though it is incredibly difficult to predict where a community-driven software project will go in the years to come, we do know that Joomla will always be evolving with the ever-changing Web. As we work toward the next major version of Joomla, much more emphasis will be placed on Joomla as a platform. The web publishing side of Joomla will likely be tightened up so that fewer extensions will be necessary to handle most cases. Our already polished and intuitive user interface will become even more streamlined for common tasks. Possibly the biggest area for change, however, will come in our efforts to expand and simplify the process of building interactive web applications on the Joomla platform. We see Joomla as a web platform to standardize upon, and want to provide all the tools necessary to achieve that goal.

While we are incredibly proud of how far our software project has come in the last four years, we realize we have much left to do. We will continue on our mission to provide a powerful and flexible platform for online collaboration and publication into our bright future. Whether you want to build a large-scale enterprise website or just learn something new and meet new people, I know you can find what you are looking for with Joomla. With Ron and Kens insight in this book, you will be building and managing Joomla websites in no time, and wondering why you did it any other way.

Louis Landry is a principal architect of Joomla 1.5 and the Joomla Framework. As a development coordinator for Joomla, Louis helped build the cutting-edge PHP application framework that powers Joomla 1.5 and is focused on future R&D.

Louis holds a Bachelors degree in computer science from Louisiana Tech University. His first experience with computers was playing on a 286 with Basic. Louis has programmed in many languages, ranging from low-level x86 Assembly to managed languages, such as Java, and scripting languages, such as PHP. He was a founding member of his universitys robotics team.

Louis is one of three founders of JXtended, which offers GPL extensions for Joomla.

Welcome to Joomla! If youre new to content management systems or even new to building websites, this book will help you get up and running in no time. All you need is a basic understanding of HTML and CSS to create high-quality websites and powerful web applications. Whether youre a web designer or an experienced developer, this tome will help you get to know one of the most popular content management systems available today.