Joomla!® For Dummies®

Introduction

Joomla (we're dropping the final exclamation point from Joomla! in the text of this book, following the convention in other books and making this book more readable) gives you total control of your Web site — the layout, the navigation menus, the text, everything. And this book gives you total control of Joomla.

Today, users are demanding more from Web sites. It's not enough to have static text on your Web site — not if you want a steady stream of visitors. You've got to update your pages continually, making your site fresh and keeping it new. You've got to have an attractively, professionally formatted site. You've got to have tons of extras: polls and e-mail signups and newsflashes and menus, and more.

Who can afford the time to maintain a site like that and write the content too?

Now you can. Content management systems (CMSes) like Joomla are coming to the rescue, letting people put together spectacular sites with very little work.

Want to publish a new article on your site? No problem. Want to let users rate your articles with a clickable bar of stars? Also no problem. Want to link your articles with a cool system of drop-down menus? No trouble. Want to let people log into your site to gain special privileges? No worries. Want to let users search every page on your site? Yep — no problem at all.

CMSes are all the rage on the Internet these days: They give you the complete framework of a Web site and allow you to manage it professionally with a few clicks. All you have ...