An Overview on Installing Joomla and Using the Control Panel

By John W Daniels

If you’ve never heard of Joomla, and most likely you haven’t, its a very nice software package that allows you to create a full featured website and easily maintain content on that site. It is rather complicated to set up, but the results are very professional looking and fairly easy to maintain. The best thing about Joomla though is that its open source and completely free.

Step 1: Installing Joomla

The first thing you need is some sort of hosting provider. Obviously that provider may be your school system or organization itself. If it is, you need to check on if you can even use Joomla on their servers because they may have strict guidelines on what software is allowed. I started out in this situation, but found an inexpensive workaround. I got permission to move our website off of the organizational website and onto a private hosting server, namely the services provided by Hostgator.

It ended up costing us about $100 for a year of hosting including the registering of our domain. Really not bad at all considering your talking about a website that’s going to be used for informational purposes by hopefully hundreds if not thousands of people. If you are lucky enough to use Host Gator or a service like it, you probably will have access to Cpanel. Cpanel is your best friend when it comes to creating websites. It has this really nice feature called Fantastico. Basically Fantastico allows you to almost instantly install several open source software packages. These include things like PHP Forums, WordPress, and yes even Joomla.

So, log into your Cpanel http://www.yoursite.com/cpanel and go to Fantastico. From there, choose Joomla 1.5 (or whatever is the newest) and follow the instructions to install it in your main folder, basically don’t put in a folder for it to install to and it defaults to the main one. If you aren’t using a service with Cpanel, you’ll have to use a ftp program to upload Joomla and then set up some MySQL databases to make it function. This is fairly complicated but they do provide instructions and excellent online help forums should you need to take this route. However, in an effort to keep this guide short and sweet I will not provide this information here.

Step 2: Accessing the Control Panel

All changes in Joomla are made from the administrator panel. That is found at http://www.yoursite.com/administrator. You will have created a user-name and password in the installation so hopefully you remember it or wrote it down because you need it to access the panel. Once there you should see a nice button interface. Some important buttons that you will make good use of are:

Front Page Manager: Just like it sounds, this is where you go to control what is on the front page.

Menu Manager: This is where you go to delete menus you won’t need, create new menus you will need, and create the items in those menus. This is one of my favorite features of Joomla because it allows you to easily set up multiple menus to help your visitors navigate the site easily.

Media Manager: This is where you go to add pictures to the site. Basically you upload your pictures from the manager and it creates a library that you can then use to insert pictures on any part of the site. While I would have preferred the ability to add pictures to my pages on the fly like WordPress allows, this does create a nice little library over time.

Category Manager: Just like categories in blogs, this is where you go to set up how you will organize the content in your site. Some categories might include news, parent information, upcoming events, etc.

Add New Content: This button allows you to add new pages to your site. You will need to pick a section such as front page and then a category such as news and then create your content. Whats nice about Joomla is that it uses a plug-in called TinyMCE to give you a Microsoft Word type environment for creating content. This will make it very easy to create professional looking pages for anyone that is familiar with Microsoft Word. Its not perfect, but its a lot better then a blank white box staring back at you with a bunch of obscure buttons at the top.

Content Item Manager: This is where you go to manage the pages you have created. You can edit them, decide what section or category they go in, decide whether they should show up on the front page, or if they should be published on the site at all. Its a nice feature that allows you to create and set up future content and then decide when it goes live.

User Manager: You can use this to create user accounts for the site. Basically if you have more then one person working on the site and you want to have different permission levels this is where you would go to create those accounts.

Language Manager: Pretty self explanatory, it defaults to English but should this need to be changed you can download language packs for most major languages.

Static Content Manager: Allows you to create content that will not change and will always be on the site. Honestly I didn’t use this option that much.

Global Configuration:

Beyond the buttons you also have several menus at the top.

Home: Just returns you to the main control panel.

Site: Just a menu list of the buttons we’ve already been over.

Menu: Gives you a list of all the menus on your site. You can either go to the menu manager to work with them or pick an individual menu from the list that you would like to work with.

Content: Gives you the features of the content manager area in a list.

Components: Quite a bit here to go through.

* Banners are mainly for if you have advertising on your site. May be something you do for a fund raiser, otherwise probably not a concern.

* Contacts allows you to create contact information for the administrators of your site, teachers, etc. You can then use this data to create lists of contact information on your site. Honestly this is going to take a long time to set up so its value is really based on whether or not your really going to use it.

* Mass Mail: If you have made contacts of all your parents or organization members you can use this area to send mass e-mails to all of them at the same time.

* News Feeds: This allows you to add RSS feeds to your site. If there are national websites for your organization or other sites that generally have news that concerns your members this is a good way to keep them constantly updated with the latest news. You will need to check the website you want to feed from and see if they offer RSS feeds.

* Polls: Allows you to create polls that the visitors of your site can vote in.

* Syndicate: Allows you to create a RSS feed of your site should you want to share information with other websites.

* Weblinks: This is a feature I really like. It allows you to create link categories and then add in links with descriptions and other information. You can then create pages of links sorted by category with all the important information about them and even have the links ranked by the number of times people visited them from your site.

Its great for education and other organizations that want to have a lot of external resources for their students and members to use.

Modules: These are the boxes on the left and right sides of your pages. They can be set up to have all sorts of things including menus, static content, even Google Gadgets and RSS feeds. The Administrative Module area allows you to change the control panel, I didn’t mess with this but if you get advanced with Joomla I’m sure its a nice feature.

Mambots: These are Joomla’s versions of plugins, things that add function to your site such as the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. I believe they are called plugins in versions 1.5 and beyond. There is a ton of cool stuff out there for Joomla that you can find an install (from the installer menu), just be careful and make sure to do frequent backups in case you do something you don’t mean to.

Installers: Offers you the ability to install new functions to your website such as templates, components, and plug-ins. Allows for a great deal of customization.

Messages: Allows you to check messages that people have sent you about the site.

System: Gives you information about your website such as which version of Joomla it is using.

Help: Knowledge database to help you with any issues that might arise.

So, you have now installed and gone over the basic features of Joomla and its control panel. The next guide I write will cover some of the more practical things you can do with your site such as creating website lists, adding translation function, and further customizing your site. I hope that this guide has been informational and convinced you to try out Joomla.

John Daniels is an educator and computer technician. He blogs at [http://www.simplyconservative.net] because its fun and cheaper then therapy.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_W_Daniels

http://EzineArticles.com/?An-Overview-on-Installing-Joomla-and-Using-the-Control-Panel&id=2448435

Popular Posts:

• BreezingForms
• Search Everything for WordPress
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• Joomla and It’s Advantages
• Feedburner WordPress Plugin for WordPress
• Subscribe to Comments for WordPress
• SEO Title Tag for WordPress
• Joomla Templates And Plug Ins For Webdesign
• Extended Menu Plugins
• Configurable Tag Cloud (CTC) for WordPress

Be Sociable, Share!

•