Book

Honestly, by requesting this book from the Symbol-Plus publishing house, I was just wondering what happened to Joomla! From the moment I last tried to use it. (It was still in those troubled times when both Mambo and Joomla! Were one and the same.)

The complexity of the appeal, the non-obviousness of the links, the need to delve into someone else's PHP code just to make a decent template, have long discouraged me from using free web solutions. Now with the help of the book I will try to understand the secrets of the new version of “Joomla! 1.5 ".

You can listen to the audio version of this article on WEbdiktor.ru.

First a few words about the publication. Soft cover, quality paper, imputed layout. In general, this book is printed to be readable.

The content of the publication is divided into 12 chapters on all aspects of working with CMS. From the installation of the system to facilitate SEO-optimization and a few large practical examples of creating a website. In order for you to have a fuller impression of the content of the book, below I will give its content with brief comments.

Chapter 1: Content Management Systems and an Introduction to Joomla!

Contains the traditional talkology on the topic of websites, CMS and other aspects of the web. A short list of system capabilities, written in advertising and promotional form, serves as a payload.

Chapter 2: Downloading and Installing Joomla!

A 19-page narration on how to access joomla.org and download the latest version of the system.

Chapter 3: Basics of administering Joomla!

Explains the basic terms used, and introduces the system interface. I finally realized what “mambots” are and mentally shook the hand of people who renamed them “plugins”.

Chapter 4: Content to the whole head: content management

One of the most useful chapters of the book. Describes the principles of the formation of pages and organization of content in the system. This and the next chapters are key in the book.

Chapter 5: Creating Menus and Navigation Elements

Continuation of the reasoning begun in the previous chapter.

Chapter 6: Joomla Extensions

A story about system extensions and how to install them (but not how to create them). List of the most popular extensions.

Chapter 7: Content Expansion: Articles and Editors

Description of work with WISYWIG, editing options. The distribution of rights to edit the content of the site.

Chapter 8: Attracting Visitors

Basic SEO information and description of suitable extensions.

Chapter 9: Creating a CSS Based Template

To create a template is used not only CSS, but also PHP. To understand everything that is said in the chapter, it would be good to know both these disciplines.

Chapters 10 through 12 are dedicated to creating specific sites based on Jooomla! In the 10th, the creation of a school site is considered, in the 11th restaurant site, and in the 12th blog.

The book is written very "tasty." Starting to read it, you suddenly begin to understand how cool it is to work on such a wonderful system as “Joomla!”, Which has so many third-party developers, that any needs of your site have already been implemented as appropriate extensions.

On the style we can say that the book was created by programmers for programmers. And although the author is clearly trying to write in simple language, this is by no means always the case. The book often tries to encompass the immense, using special terms and referring to sources on the Web. (The materials may still be there, but certainly not in Russian.)

Verdict

This book is actually a Russian-language documentation on CMS Joomla! According to her, anyone (having average XHTML, CSS, PHP knowledge) can learn to work with this CMS. So all Joomla fans! in particular, and open source in general, can safely go to the store - the book is worth it.

To all the rest, I want to suggest thinking about the following question: “Is it worth contacting Joomla !?”. Getting a system for free, what do you save on? On the support, quality documentation (is it considered that the CMS is free if you paid for the book, which explains how to work with it?), And the suppliers' responsibility.

People making free apps don't owe anything to anyone. There is a high probability that the addition you need after the next system update will no longer be supported by its developer (and such cases have been in my practice). The time you need to get out of this situation (implement another component, fix a component, write a new component) will bring direct losses to your network business. Free solutions are good as a "trial ball", but it is impossible to base something serious on such a shaky foundation.

More detailed thoughts on free and paid CMS can be found in the first half of my article “CMS for work” .