Joomla 3.0 Part A

This is the 1st in a blog post series on Joomla 3 based on what I learn on the video training program by Addison-Wesley Professional. Joomla is a content management system and is more customizable than Wordpress and easier to use than Drupal  which are also both CMS's. The Wordpress program started out as a blogging software and Joomla too has lots of blogging features. Joomla is free although you usually pay hosting fees. It's based around a program called Mambo also a CMS although it has become much more popular. Version 3.0 is the latest version. They update it frequently. You also can use a FTP program to upload it but its not essential. You don't need to understand HTML which you would if using Dreamweaver or Wordpress. You use MySQL & PHP with Joomla. You have a front end or visitors site which is what visitors see. There is also a back end or administrators site which is where most editing takes place. Things like the search box, menus and logo are called modules and are located around the page. The component area is the main part of the page where articles are located. You should use the navigation buttons not use the browser windows to go from page to page whilst editing it. A red x next to an article means it isn't published, a green tick means is published and a yellow star means is featured on the articles page. You click the Joomla icon to go to the control panel. Menu manager lets you create menus. The extensions manager is where you install extensions which extend the usability of Joomla. When you finish work always log out to avoid your site being hacked. You need categories for each article you do. To enable searching and get the article shown in the site you have to link to the article. You use the category manager in the content menu. You click new then enter category to list category and save. To enter a subcategory you select new/ options/ and select the relevant category it is under. You can also designate the number of levels of subcategories you want.