Introduction to Joomla

Joomla is one of the biggest CMSes  out there, it has a large fanbase with developers building lots of components, plugins and themes for its users. One of the main advantages of Joomla is that it is very easy to install and use. But this is no unique thing, for this is what all big CMSes are built with in mind from the beginning.

Though there are some really good things about Joomla that you can't find in Drupal or Wordpress. The ability to build and implement a good and useful Social Network or Community are a lot easier and less painful than in any other big CMS. I have tried to build communities with Drupal  before and I can say from my experience that you can't build a good Community without any knowledge about programming. You can implement basic functions but they will never become what you had in your mind. Compared to Joomla, Drupal is very crude and ugly. What I liked about Joomla was its nice looking back-end and stylish themes. Though the back-end wasn't the most easiest to learn, when you get the hang of it and learn the basics it all makes sense.

Installation

Installing Joomla is not very hard. Upload all the files to your server. When done, enter the domain or IP adress of your site and you should be redirected to the install folder of Joomla. Follow the simple steps and you're done. 

If you run into any errors regarding "XML" or something like that you should start over again from the beginning and hopefully it works this time. It took me three installs to learn this.

Basic back-end introduction

To login to your administration panel in Joomla, simply enter http://yourdomain.com/administrator.

When you first enter your administration panel you will find a main menu consisting of different main options with sub-options if you hover over them.

Site - here is where all you main configuration settings can be changed. The primary use for this tab is to either navigate back to the administration panel or manage your users or media uploaded to the site. I often use this to navigate into my Global Configuration page.

Menus - All menus are listed here. I think this is a little complicated to comprehend in the beginning because all menus, no matter the theme you use they always have the same name, but depending on which theme you use, the menus can have different positions. 

Content - here you can change content or add content to menus or pages which you have preset. This is the main disadvantage of Joomla compared to other CMSes. Joomla built for more static pages than blogs. Compared to Wordpress, Joomla is a pain to use for blogging purposes.

Components - components are the main building blocks of your site. See them as the main plugins for your site. When you hover over this tab you will see all components that are installed, click on a component name to change that components settings.

Extensions - the extension tab provides an easy way to administer your components, themes and plugins. You can install and uninstall components/themes/plugins very easy by using the extension manager. You can also edit themes and their CSS and HTML files.

Tools - this is a tab I rarely use, mostly to clean the cache, but otherwise this tab is rather unuseful.

This is just a beginning of my series introducing Joomla. More articles will come.