Joomla! 1.5 Site Blueprints

Tailor-made plans for easily building powerful and exciting Joomla! sites

• Instant Joomla! - Build 10 exciting and simple web projects
• Expand and tailor the sample projects to your or your client's need
• Create quick prototypes of commonly used applications within hours
• Develop your own custom application by merging features from the example projects
• Combine projects from several chapters to create your own killer web application

In Detail

Joomla! is a powerful CMS used to build all kinds of websites. But when you're urgently tasked with building a specific kind of site, it's not always obvious which extensions to use or where to begin. Imagine how easy it would be if you had some simple directions to create Joomla! websites for personal or business use within a day. Would you be interested?

This book will give you a competitive edge by helping you to rapidly implement prototype web projects for personal and business use. With this book almost anyone with just a bit of Joomla! knowledge can build a useful web application and tailor it to his or her needs.

This book is a project-based guide to developing web applications with Joomla!. It will take you through all the steps to build different types of Joomla! websites and guide you to get your new site up and running in a couple of hours without employing a developer. It should enable you to take full advantage of the powerful core features offered by the Joomla! framework together with the many available contributed modules and themes to develop applications within hours. You will be guided, by means of illustrated hands-on example projects, to build foundation projects that you can easily adapt or enhance to create even more powerful web projects. If you want to develop exciting web applications for profit or pleasure this book is for you.

However, this book is not an introduction to Joomla!, nor an in-depth manual for using Joomla!; and even though it partially covers some basics such as installation and how to create articles, this is only done in the process of building the featured projects. Readers should; therefore, already have an understanding of the basic Joomla! terminologies, how to access and to use the administration pages, and also how to customize by uploading and engaging new templates. The book's appendix also offers plenty of useful advice and references on this.

When you have completed each project, you will have the knowledge and confidence to apply the techniques you have learned to create your own custom web application. You may also combine projects from several chapters to create your own killer web application.

This book provides a foundation for 10 exciting and powerful Joomla! website projects including community, blog network, e-commerce store, photo sharing, Google mashup, and so on for tailoring to your needs.

What you will learn from this book

You will see how to build the following site projects:

• A company website
• A fan site for users wishing to share their interests by blogging -built around the Blog module
• An events site for listing events from multiple users -built around the Events module
• A Community Portal for social networking
• A newspaper site for publishing an online newspaper or magazine
• An e-commerce website with Ubercart
• A directory site for listings in several categories
• A photo sharing site for publishing and organizing images from multiple users
• A Googlemap site to create complex Googlemap mashups
• A news aggregating site for publishing news feeds from several sources

Approach

The hands-on example projects in this book are based on fictitious website development briefs, and they illustrate practical ways of applying Joomla! The book dives straight into the process of constructing the featured projects. A chapter is dedicated to each example website project. Each chapter is a separate project booklet, written independently of any other chapter. Each chapter contains a fictitious brief from which we derive the list of core and contributed extensions that we will need to implement the project. Then each chapter progresses into step-by-step instructions for building the web project, aided by the extensive use of screenshots.

Who this book is written for

This book is for Joomla! developers who want to build a range of Joomla! sites, and see how to apply the many available Joomla! extensions and features in different scenarios. If you would like to try building websites as a freelancer or give your business a professional quality web presence, this is a great book to help you get started.