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Joomla is my favorite application for clients who need a content management system (CMS). One of Joomla's strongest points is that it has a large and active community of users and developers. This in turn means that bugs and security issues get fixed rapidly and that there are a large number of add-ins to choose from to extend the functionality of Joomla when the function you need isn't built in.
There is a forum available for community help, as well as a wiki.
Your website can be thought of as having a front end and a back end. The front end is the public part of your site. It is what visitors see. The back end is the administrator section. This is where you control what the site looks like, what is published content and so on.
To login to your website as administrator go to the URL for your website with ”/administrator” appended to the end of the URL.
http://www.yoursite.com/administrator
and enter the user name and password provided you. You may have to type in the …/administrator part of the url into your browser address bar.
A brief introduction to what to expect when logged into the administrator side of your site can be found at Admin Intro.
Joomla definitions and site organization
Most CMS software have their own vocabulary for referring to the structural parts of a site. This is in part because of differing philosophies regarding design, purpose and function. One of the most confusing items in Joomla is the question of “What do they mean by Blog?”. Read this short guide to Joomla definitions and site organization to get a handle on the parts of a Joomla site.
One of the first things to be done for a new site is to make it live. Normally, if Basically Brilliant! developed your site, we will “turn the switch” to make it live after you have approved the beta site. However, you may want to make the site live sooner, or want to take the site offline while you update content. Here's how to take your site offline or put it online.
Joomla refers to most of the content you create as articles. An article might be an About us page, a blog post, a description of the services you offer or an article or news story. Joomla organizes articles into sections and categories. Categories belong to sections. Each article belongs to a section/category combination.
What this means from a content creation perspective is that you must first have sections and categories to assign your articles to before you create your content. (Actually, you can create articles without first having sections and categories but you will likely have to go back and assign them to categories and sections later).
The content creation process is similar for Sections, Categories and Artilcles. In fact, you will discover that many administration proceses follow a similar pattern. We will start at the highest organizational level, with instructions for creating a Section.
The process for creating articles for your site (i.e., content) is similar to that for creating Sections and Categories. If you've already mastered Sections and Categories, here are instructions on how to create the content that will belong to those sections and categories.
Creating an article, saving it and setting its status to published isn't necessarily going to result in that article being visible to visitors on your website. Sometimes you need or want to create new content to a new menu. Here's an introduction to how to create menus and link them to content.
Allowing visitors to your site to register is an important part of many websites. But even if you don't want strangers logging into your site, you might need multiple users. You can create users to help write articles and or to help manage your site. Here is my introduction to managing users in Joomla.
There are a number of different ways to upload images or other files to your site. The first way is within the content editor. This is covered in the article on creating and editing articles.
A second way is to use the Media Manager. You can reach this from the administrator menu Site > Media Manager or the Media Manager control panel icon. This looks and works similar to the Upload Image section of the content editor.
A third way to upload images is to use an FTP client. This allows you to upload files to your server. If you have many files to upload, this is the best method to use.