First Day of Joomla!
The first day of a new technology is the toughest because you don’t know what you don’t know, and everything seems to be above your head. It’s also hard for teachers because it’s hard to remember the stuff you didn’t know you didn’t know. After seeing some of the same things over and over, and reading the same thing said several different ways, things just start to come into focus. Well here’s what I wish somebody would have told me on my first day with Joomla!
First of all Joomla! is a content management system. That means it has tools built in to store content (database), display the content (styles, layout), and organize/access content (links, lists of links).
The simplest way to get started with Joomla is probably to make a menu and create menu items that link to articles. This will deliver your basic “brochure” type web site. In order for that menu to be displayed it must be put into a module. With the exception of articles (or other components that menu items can link to) in order for something to display, it must be packaged in a module. The menu is packaged in a module by creating a module of type “menu.” Simple enough right?
I WISH SOMEBODY WOULD HAVE TOLD ME THIS – there is an organizational structure in Joomla for the content: first there are sections. In each section there can be categories and in the categories are the individual articles. However, these sections have NO CONNECTION with menus and categories have no connection with menu items. I found this odd and irritating at first, but you get over it. It actually does allow for some flexibility and there’s really not that much redundancy. As far as I know there are no reliable plugins that map the menus/menu items to sections/categories.
Creating a bunch of articles and building menus that link to them is the simplest first step to getting familiar with Joomla.