Using Joomla!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. A Tour of the Administrator Panel

If you want to follow along in this chapter, you need to have Joomla installed. If you haven’t yet downloaded and installed Joomla, see Appendix A for instructions. We’ll be taking a brief tour of the Joomla Administrator Panel and jumping right into setting up the structure of the website.

In any good CMS, the administrator dashboard is where the magic happens. In Joomla, this is referred to as the Administrator Backend and allows site administrators to build and maintain robust websites. This chapter will cover the Control Panel, Menu, and Administrator Module regions of the backend. Other chapters in this book will discuss these items in more detail.

If you haven’t installed Joomla yet, you can refer to Figure 3-1 to see the different areas we’ll cover.

If you have Joomla installed, you can log in and view your own administrator control panel at http://www.YourSite.com/administrator (remember to replace “YourSite” with your URL).

Control Panel

The Control Panel is more or less the administrator’s home page. It’s the launching point from which you will build and manage your website. The Control Panel dashboard is divided into two columns. The column on the left sidebar shows links to commonly used areas of the site. The right column shows the administrator modules. Figure 3-1 shows the Control Panel columns you would see if you were logged in as a Super Administrator. Depending on whether you are logged in as a Manager, Administrator, or ...