Aimed at beginners and intermediate users, this book provides step by step instructions on how to set up a web site using the Joomla 1.5 Content Management System. The book has a companion site (http://www.writingyourdreams.com) and access to the Safari-enabled online version of it.
For those used to the Visual Quickstart Guides, this book follows the normal style and level. For me, though, these guides are just a bit too basic and lacks useful tips. The installation chapter misses out installing the pre-requisites like MySQL and PHP. Instead, it’s straight down to installing Joomla which is a simple, straight-forward wizard, that practically pre-populates itself. Then come the chapters on how to “create” different types of modules. What I’ve found though, is that the easiest and quickest way to start with Joomla is to install the sample data, so that it creates the modules and assigns suitable positions. It’s then a question of which modules to keep registered, and changing or trashing the sample data to meet your specific needs.
There are two things that make this book worth buying:-
1) the chapter on creating your own templates. So far, I’ve always found a suitable free template, and maybe changed it slightly, but this book provides a pretty good demonstration on how to build what initially looks to be a complicated template with multiple module positions using CSS rather than tables.
2) the excellent tip that you can view a templates module positions by typing ?tp=1 at the end of the URL e.g. http://www.mywebsite.com?tp=1. Oops. Now I’ve shared that, there is only one reason for buying this book.