I will take you through a step by step process of creating a website using the open source content management system, Joomla. A Content Management System (CMS) is basically a software package which gives you a way separating the content from the view giving you more flexibility and ease of operation and maintenance. It also provides an easy to use framework to add and publish content to your site. In some ways it is similar to WordPress but is more advanced and gives a lot more options both for view and content management.

If you need more information on what a CMS is, you check out the Wikipedia.

You can find a lot of information at the Joomla home page for the more advanced settings and features but I’ll do my best to give you as much information as possible.

Here’s what you will need to get started:

For now lets start with a basic local installation of Joomla on your PC. To fully implement Joomla, you will need a file system, a database and a web server. Instead of installing and configuring each of them separately, we will a package which includes all of them.

You can find these packages at Joomla Extension directory which by the way is where all the extensions for Joomla are published. Extensions are a way of customizing you site with Joomla. We will go extensions a bit later in this tutorial.

Basics of Joomla

There a few major components that Joomla uses to accomplish the task and lets go through each of them one by one. As with any CMS, any Joomla site has 2 faces, first one is what the world sees’. Its all fancy and beautiful and all your work behind the scenes is paid off here. We will refer to this part of the site as the frontend from now on. The other side of the web-site is the administration site where you spend a major chunk of your time adding content to you site and setting up how its displayed on the frontend. This is the back end of the site. The backend for Joomla is a very important part of your website. Everything you see on the front end is added and configured in the backend. To get to the administration page of your Joomla site, just add “/administrator” to the end of your page url.

Eg. localhost/Joomla/administrator/

The default username/pswd for these standalone servers is admin/admin. If that doesn’t work, you might want to check the Read Me notes that came with it. Static content in Joomla is created as Articles. These articles can be placed in different Categories which in-turn are in Sections. If the article is a stand alone page and does not belong in any of these Sections, it can be left out as a “Uncategorized” which means it’s a static page by itself.

Creating an Article

To create an article simply click on the “Add new Article” icon on the dashboard or select Content à Article Manager

Click on the button New to create a new article.

You can start adding content to the text area similar to MS Word and add formatting to it. Once done you can save by clicking the Save button on the top right.

Lets create a new article called “Hello World” and make it a static page by selecting the Section as Uncategorized.

And if you want to see how your article looks on your site, click the Preview button on your top right corner.

There you go, you have created an article in Joomla which is also a static page if you want it to be.

Ganesh Madireddy is an IT professional who specializes in creating small to medium scale web solutions using open source Content Management Systems and configuring them for Search Engine Optimization. He is also the webmaster for a few high profile web-sites.
You can visit his web-site at http://www.3rdrockit.com to find more tutorials on Joomla (including this one with images) as well as other open source software packages.

Tags: joomla