What is Joomla ?

I began my study of site-building with the question: What is Joomla and how can it help me in creating sites ).

In addition, I did not even know what HTML is, and even more so CSS. But in Jumla, in principle, you can work without knowledge of the language of hypertext markup and style design, although you will still experience certain difficulties.

My acquaintance with this engine, taught by the bitter experience of communicating with the ucoz, I prefaced, as you probably already guessed, by a thorough study of the great and terrible language of hypertext markup.

What is Jumla and where to start studying it?

Well, oh well, I studied HTML and CSS, although, of course, about style markup, it is loudly said. To learn how chess figures go, does not mean to learn how to play chess. CSS is really a very difficult thing and learning to do something with it is not as easy as it seems at first. For example, the same fundamentals of block layout are built on the knowledge of style markup.

Nevertheless, in order to fix something insignificant in the foreign style sheet, well, such as the color and size of the font in one or another area of the template, the indentation between some elements of the layout is easy.

I highly recommend for a more productive work to install in your Firefox browser, the most remarkable Firebug plugin, you will not regret it. Although now all browsers already include its counterparts, Firefox still will be more abruptly sensitive.

Let’s continue from the description of how my acquaintance took place, to what this engine actually is, that is, try to systematize the thesis on what it is all the same for the engine and what features to create and manage the site it provides you:

1. First of all, this is a free content management system, which appeared as a branch from the paid CMS Mambo. The development and updating of the engine are handled by a whole group of enthusiasts, which to some extent explains some unoptimized code and the heaviness of the resources on it working.
2. There are three main versions of the engine that are not compatible with each other (you can not upgrade from an earlier version to a later version):
   • Jumla 1.0  is an old and officially not supported branch
   • 3.8  is the most long-lived version of the engine, to which there are a lot of extensions and templates. Updated and maintained so far.
   • Joomla 3.9  is a completely new version of CMS, to which there are very few extensions, but behind it is the future.
3. Inside the very Joomla series, there are constant updates and engine updates, which fix the detected defects and vulnerabilities (read about how to update Jumla and where you can download these updates).
4. Installing Joomla 3.8 is done simply by copying the engine files to the hosting (there are quite digestible versions of even a free host for the site on Joomla ) and prescribing the name and password to the database created in advance on the hosting.
5. All work with your site will be carried out from the admin area, articles in which you can write in a convenient visual editor, similar in its simplicity to work in the Word (by default, a visual editor based on the TinyMCE plug-in is used ). Therefore, in order to create and successfully fill your site with materials, you do not need to know the basics of block layout, which is a huge advantage of content management systems that will submit even to the absolute beginner in site-building.
6. The appearance of your website can be dramatically changed at one time by changing the template (themes), which can be found on the Internet a great variety (both paid and free).
7. Joomla, right after installation, has a number of built-in free modules, plugins, and components that you can use for your needs. But besides this, there are a lot of extensions for this engine from third-party developers that will help you implement any of your ideas and projects with them (without exaggeration).
8. In response to a question about what Jumla is and what can be done on it, you can give examples of sites on this engine, among which there are a number of very popular projects with high attendance, both in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet and in the bourgeois.

Well, in short, we got acquainted with what is a free Joomla content management system and what a wonderful and functional engine it is. Well, now let me continue to describe my first impression of acquaintance with this miracle, as well as talk about what first of all caused me trouble and misunderstanding.

Despite all my diligence, I had some gags in the process of studying, and the first was the lack of understanding of the placement of materials in sections and categories. Everything was clear with the placement of so-called static materials, this is when a specific menu item in Joomla refers to a specific article.

If someone does not remember, for this you need to go from under the admin panel to the settings of any menu, click the “Create” button and select the option “Standard material template” from the opened list. Then at the top right, we find the “Select material”, boldly click on the “Select” button and search for the article you want to link to this menu item. Everything is simple and understandable.

It was not clear how to tie to a menu item a number of articles sorted, say, by creation date in such order that new articles were always higher than the older ones. Those. do what is implemented in WordPress by default – the blog. On understanding this point, it took me more time than writing several articles on this blog.

The concept of sections and categories in Jumla

In this Cms there is an opportunity to sort the materials by, how to say it, well, let there be folders with only two levels of nesting (sections and categories). Those. you can create as many large folders as you like (or even better call them boxes) into which you can then put as many smaller folders as you like, and our articles will already be in them. In this case, each article will be in a certain folder, and that – in a certain box. You probably already understood that folders are categories, and boxes are partitions in Joomla.

However, before you start to expand the articles into folders, you first need to drag boxes (create the necessary partitions) and place empty folders in them (create the necessary categories in the sections). Those. first, we think about how many boxes we will need or, in other words, how many sections we need to create for convenient work with articles.

Then, having created these sections, we create in them the necessary number of categories. And when this work is completed, we will only have to sort the articles into folders (categories) so that later on we can hang up any article from a folder (category) or even from the whole box (section) to any menu item. It’s wonderful, is not it?

Hang on the menu item all the articles from the section or category can be in two ways, and, as a result, we will get a different display of these articles on the site. When creating a new menu item, you will need to choose either “Category Blog Template” (or section) or “Category List Template” (section). In the first case, we will get the same blog as in WordPress but created by Jumla’s tools.

In the second case, when this menu item is activated, we will see only a list of the article headings in the selected category or section sorted by the date of article creation.

Yes, if you have already decided on the choice of the engine for the site, then do not forget to share this article.