CREATE WEBSITE EASILY WITH JOOMLA

  What is Joomla?

 Joomla is a free system for creating websites. It is an open source project, which, like most open source projects, is constantly in motion. It has been extremely successful for seven years now and is popular with millions of users worldwide.
The word Joomla is a derivative of the word Jumla from the African language Swahili and means "all together".
The project Joomla is the result of a heated discussion between the Mambo Foundation, which was founded in August 2005, and its then-development team. Joomla is a development of the successful system Mambo. Joomla is used all over the world for simple homepages and for complex corporate websites as well. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable.
The Joomla team has organised and reorganised itself throughout the last seven years to better meet the user demands.

 Version Strategy

Joomla versions are either standard term or long term supported (STS and LTS). A standard term supported release is good for 7 months, a long term support release for 22 months. Every 6 months a new STS will be released.
You can recognize a long term release by the .5 in the version.

• Joomla 2.5 is the actual long term support release and will be replaced by Joomla 3.5 in September 2013
• Joomla 3.0 is the actual standard term support release and will be replaced by Joomla 3.1 in March 2013
• Joomla 3.1 will be the next short term supported release from March 2013 to September 2013
• Joomla 3.5 will be the next long term supported release from September 2013 to March 2015

Long term releases are the proposed path for productive websites.
Standard term releases are a kind of playground for site builders and developers and if you start to build a website from scratch the proposed entry point (Figure 1).

                                                                        fig : 1

What's new in Joomla 3.0?

There are many improvements behind the scenes.
The most significant changes for site builders and users are:

• Joomla goes mobile with new responsive templates. Your Joomla website will be displayed nicely on every mobile device browser (Figure 2).
  Joomla has a new user interface
• Joomla uses the JavaScript library jQuery
• The webinstaller is easier and only a 3 steps procedure
• Language packages can be installed directly from the extension manager (Figure 3)
• Smart Search, which was introduced with Joomla 2.5 got many improvements
• TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor comes in a newer version (3.5.6)
•   Some technical changes are not that visible but more than useful and appreciated
•   Saving blank articles allowed
•   With the PHP Memcached Driver Joomla performance can be accelerated

  

  JOOMLA ON MOBILE DEVICES.

•    Use of another library (JFeed) for feed management rather than SimplePie
•    Continued clean up of older unused code, files and database fields and tables and improved     standardization of tables.
• Extensive work on code style standardisation and consistency
• Unit testing in the CMS
• Updated system tests in the CMS

and many more

What can you do with Joomla?

All kinds of dynamic websites can be created with Joomla. These websites consist of web pages containing content such as text, images, video and audio. The pages changes or customizes themselves frequently and automatically, based on certain criteria. Take the frontpage as an example. Usually it displays the newest articles automatically on top.
As all the sites in the world wide web are based on the same principles websites can be roughly divided in

BLOGS

 A blog is a discussion or informational site consisting of articles (posts, blog entries). The most recent articles appears first.

Brand building sites

 A site with the purpose of creating an experience of a brand online. These sites usually do not sell anything, but focus on building the brand.

Celebrity sites

http://dhinchakdev.blogspot.in/

 

Personal websites

 

http://dhinchakdev.blogspot.in/

600,000,000 websites

Did you ever ask yourself How Many Websites Are There in 2012 ? There are a lot, but nobody knows the exact answer to that question.
As you may have noticed, most of the example sites are not the big fishes in the world wide web but they fulfil the needs of their creators and their clients. This does not mean, that Joomla is only useful for smaller websites, it just means that most of the websites are made with limited resources on time and budget and for that reason people often build them with open source systems like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.
Bigger websites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Google, Apple, or Microsoft are usually not using one open source content management system for their websites. These companies usually have thousands of developers that create often hundred of websites by selecting and combining all the ideas and solutions available on the market. It is usually not about the technique, it’s more about business models and ideas.

Amateurs versus Professionals

The above listed websites are created by people that I want to divide in amateurs and professionals.

• Amateurs are trying to get around. They usually do not want to know one’s stuff, they are happy if succeeded.
• Professionals try to get to the ground of what they are doing to be able to provide solutions which can be optimized over time. They try to transfer knowledge to strengthen others and build their business around the topic.

For Joomla it doesn’t matter whether you are an amateur or a professional. Both can deal with Joomla and often amateurs become professionals over time and professionals start to get more involved to make Joomla CMS and Framework better and better.
Time for the first and the last advice in this book!

Ignore people talking about what you have to do. Focus on moving toward what you like to do instead

What are the common parts in all these websites?

Even if the listed example websites are all very different, they have a few things in common:

• they are displaying content (text, images, video, audio)
• they have individual designs, layouts and colors. Individual doesn’t mean perfect or tasteful or artistic. It just means “individual” :)
• visitors can interact in some ways with the site. Sometimes they have to create a user account in advance
• the common static words are available in different languages, sometimes the content too.

Joomla is the glue

All these websites are based on the ideas of their creators and the almost endless possibilities of the Joomla Content Management System. In this book, I want to cover the common parts of all these websites. You’ll be able to create a quite nice looking website on your own after you have read the next 9 chapters. And it’s up to you, whether you do it in the amateur or in the professional way :)

Source: http://cocoate.com/j3/what-is-joomla