Beginning Joomla!® Web Site Development

Chapter 9. Troubleshooting Your Site

You've just learned the language, installed Joomla!, picked out some great extensions from the JED, configured your site, managed your content and menus, set up those great extensions you found, set up RSS feeds, and built a shiny new template! Congratulations, you're . . . half-way there! Now that your site is assembled just the way you like it, you need to take some time to test and re-test everything on the site to make sure it is working properly.

My ninth-grade biology teacher used to always say, "I've only made one mistake in my life, but then it turned out not to be a mistake, so I was mistaken." I'm still not quite sure what he meant by that, but I think he was claiming to be perfect. He also used to say, "I'm not God, but I will be some day," so I think he might have been a little crazy, but that's beside the point. Unless you are my ninth-grade biology teacher, you are not perfect. Everyone makes mistakes, which is why it is so important to double-check your work.

Joomla! makes building websites easy. It performs many of the mundane tasks that used to be done by hand-coding every page in HTML, and it makes managing content simple. Because Joomla! makes things so easy, it is natural to get complacent and get unintended results on your site. Think of Joomla! as a piece of software or an operating system. You must keep your software up-to-date and monitor its performance to ensure that it continues to work consistently the way you need it ...