Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition)
by Barrie M. North
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Book Summary Information
Author: Barrie M. NorthEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-06-01
ISBN: 0137012314
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Prentice Hall
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Book Reviews of Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition)
Book Review: Could Be So Much Better
Summary: 3 Stars
The rash of five-star reviews for Barrie North's "Joomla 1.5" proves, primarily, the scarceness of even minimally competent and comprehensible writing on the subject.
In all fairness, it does get the job done. The purpose (as I understand it) is primarily to instruct a site administrator or builder who just wants to learn the basics of the administrative interface, with a secondary aim of teaching how to modify a template. However, to analogize a trip from New York to Miami, you aren't going to take a nonstop flight or even I-95; you're going to drive down two-lane state roads, get lost, backtrack, eat lunch in Scranton, and visit the Atlanta Aquarium.
The book is just stuffed with meaningless fluff. First, at least half the book is taken up by totally unnecessary screen shots. Secondly, a good 30% of the sentences are either the tenth repetition of a simple concept or utterly meaningless.
At random, my finger picked p.110:
"What Menu Items Do
In a Joomla site, menu items do a lot! [comment -- total waste of ink] In a Joomla site, [comment -- failed high school English?] all pages are generated dynamically. [comment -- umpteenth time this has been stated] Joomla uses information from whatever link a site visitor just clicked to decide what the web page will contain and look like when the user gets there. [comment -- again, as of page 110, this has been stated repeatedly]
You can think of a menu link as having three facets:
- What content the link displays (selection criteria for articles)
- What the generated page looks like (how articles are organized in the page layout)
- Which template is selected to control the page's style and appearance
- How the menu link's appearance is controlled.
[comment - also failed 3d grade math]
The links on a menu are controlled by the menu items in that menu [comment - eyes rolling back in my head] (here the Main Menu) in the Menu Manager. This determines what pages they go to and the appearance of those pages. [comment -- didn't you JUST SAY THAT?]"
Well, despite my sarcasm, the book does have the benefit of actually leading you by the hand so that you can grasp the basics of the Byzantine structure of Joomla. You may travel New York to Miami via Scranton and Memphis, but you do end up in Miami. Hence, three stars for basic competency. If you have tried to read any of the online documentation, you will recognize that any rational explanation of Joomla is a godsend; most of the explanations I have read start the New York-Miami trip in Boston and end up somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.
If you want to administer or build a site using standard Joomla 1.5 templates, you will be able to do so after reading the book. It begins to get inadequate when it comes to making changes. In some spots it teaches elementary PHP and CSS that you had damned well better already know if you're going to start fiddling with components/modules/templates/extensions. At other spots, it fails to explain more abstruse aspects of the system adequately. In fairness, however, there are some useful bits hidden in the latter part of the book.
If I knew of a decent book (or online source) covering the two primary subjects considered in "Joomla! 1.5 . . ." I'd give it two stars. It really is horribly disorganized and replete with repetition and padding. But there aren't. It muddles to a bit of success where others fail completely.
More Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition) reviews:
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Summary of Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition)
The Best Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!TM--The World?s #1 Open Source Content Management SystemIf you want to build sophisticated websites that can be easily edited and updated, you need to master Joomla. Now there?s an easy-to-read, easy-to-use guide to Joomla! for every site manager, administrator, and developer. Leading Joomla! consultant Barrie North covers all you need to get results: installation, administration, site organization, template development, content updates, and a whole lot more. You?ll find tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions, as well as three start-to-finish case studies.
New to Joomla? No problem! This book starts with the simplest design and system concepts and builds your expertise step-by-step. You?ll rapidly master Joomla!?s power, even if you have no content management, scripting, or CSS expertise. Experienced with Joomla!? You?ll turn to this book constantly for its authoritative, plain-English, example-rich Joomla! 1.5 reference content.
- Understand content management, what Joomla! does, and how its components fit together
- Build Joomla! sites from scratch and systematically customize them to your needs
- Organize content with sections, categories, blogs, and tables
- Create dynamic pages and effective navigation
- Work with Joomla! modules and components
- Learn how to optimize your Joomla! sites for search engines
- Follow three start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, a small business site, and a blog
- Identify the most valuable Joomla! extensions and add-ons: find them and use them
About the Website
The accompanying site, www.joomlabook.com, provides five fully functional Joomla! sites with live follow-along examples from the book and up-to-date information on Joomla!.
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