This book is a fast paced tutorial to creating a website using Joomla!. If you've never used Joomla!, or even any web content management system before, then this book will walk you through each step in a friendly and accessible way. From installation, to initial set up and content entry and then on to customization for your own look and feel, this book will get you to a stable and working Joomla! based web site fast. You don't have to be an experienced web developer or designer to get a great looking site with a full set of functions using this book and Joomla! This book will guide through every step.

Joomla! is a fully featured web content management system and was created in Summer 2005 as a fork from the hugely popular Mambo CMS with many of the original Mambo developers moving their efforts to Joomla! While still in its first release, it is supported by an active and well organized open source development team and community. Joomla! is both easy to use at the entry level for creating basic websites, whilst having the power and flexibility to support complex web applications. Joomla! implements the core requirements of a full-featured CMS. It has a powerful and extensible templating system with the ability to upload and manage many different data types. User access control, content approval, rich administrative control, and content display scheduling are all built-in. New features and extensions are constantly added to the core system, with many more being available and supported by the community.

The book begins by introducing Joomla! and concepts behind content management. Then the installation of Joomla!, and its supporting software [Apache/MySQL/PHP] is covered clearly and simply. Once you have the installation up and running, we then take a tour of Joomla! as it appears out of the box, to familiarize ourselves with how it works and what is what. As you take the tour, your own ideas for what you need in your new website begin to crystallize around what you can see Joomla! is capable of. We then build our web application, using only the features of Joomla! we really need. Once we have a base version of our site up, we then learn how to change its appearance and feature set to suit our particular requirements, including bringing it into line with an established corporate identity. At the end of the book we show how you can add your own extensions to Joomla!.

This book focuses on taking you through the essential tasks to create a Joomla! site as fast as possible. These essential tasks are explained clearly, with well structured step-by-step instructions. The book does not aim to cover every feature of Joomla! nor is it a comprehensive guide to extending Joomla!. Almost everything in the book is accomplished without recourse to the underlying PHP code in which Joomla! is written. The book is very readable and the author has a particularly chatty and engaging writing style.