Zee Tutorials World

First steps in Joomla 2.5 (valid for Joomla 1.7 and 1.6 too)

Once you have installed Joomla your first steps in administering the application should be logging in the admin area and creating your first pages. The simplest page in Joomla is called an article and that's where you put content such as text and images. This tutorial contains detailed instructions on the following topics:

Logging in the Joomla admin area (valid for Joomla 1.7 and 1.6 too)

First, in order to build your web site you will have to log into the administrator area. This can be achieved by opening the corresponding URL in your web browser:

http://yourdomainname.com/administrator

Replace yourdomainname.com with your actual Joomla URL.

Next, you have to enter the admin login details which have been set during the installation:

Creating articles in Joomla

After entering the Joomla administrator area, you can check the featured articles (the ones that are included in the sample data or created by you) published on the front page through Content->Featured Articles.

You can edit them, create new ones, remove existing from the front page, delete, publish and unpublish articles.

If you have installed the Sample Data, before adding new articles you can delete the sample ones. Select them and click on the Trash button. Then remove the menu links to the sample articles from Menus->Main Menu.

After this you can add a new category from Content->Category Manager->Add New Category.

For example, you can put “Test” as the new category Title. The other options can be left blank or you can set their values as per your personal preferences. Click on the Save button to add your new category.

Next, navigate to Content->Article Manager->Add New Article.

Only the Title field is mandatory. Enter the article title. You can also select your category from the corresponding drop-down menu. Change the article State to Published. If you want to show it on the front page, set the Featured value to Yes.

Once you are ready with the settings you can proceed with the actual article content. Use the included text editor to type the article text, to include images or to directly edit the HTML code.

Under the text editor area you can set the permissions for the different user groups regarding your article.You can also adjust the settings in the Publishing Options, Article Options, Metadata Options menus.

You can hover your mouse pointer over the options’ labels and get a brief description of each one of them.Once you are ready, Save the article and check it on the front end. You can always edit the existing articles from the Joomla admin area->Content->Article Manager.

What is Joomla?

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone. Click here to understand more of its features.

Here are 10 tutorials on the Joomla fundamentals that I think are important for beginners like myself. You will need to understand the relationships between sections, categories, articles and modules before starting to build your site.

After learning the basic theories, I bet most of us will want to get some free downloads and find out how to customize Joomla templates better. Unfortunately, most of the free Joomla templates available are not really as high quality as those we see from WordPress. I managed to compile 5 of my personal favorites here.