Joomla! 1.5x Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs

In DetailSetting up a basic Joomla! Web site is easy; what comes next is hard and expensive – making the site do exactly what and look exactly how you want. With this book in hand, it is easy to adapt your site to bring your vision fully to life.
This book will help you to separate your site from the crowd of other Joomla! sites without having to invest in developers. It will guide you through how to customize different parts and aspects of your site and will also show you how to turn your site into a profitable business via these customizations. You will be able to build a successful, professional web site that will adapt to all your business needs.
You will be taken beyond the basics of Joomla!, and given an insight into the techniques and tools used by the professionals to rapidly develop unique, custom sites. This will enable you to develop your own professional-quality Joomla! site without assistance, saving you time and money. You will learn how modules, plugins, components, and templates are constructed, and how to make changes in them, giving you the confidence to make more elaborate changes to your site. On top of this will be a look at common problems Joomla! site developers face and how best to deal with them.
You will also learn techniques for building a business with Joomla!, as you step through building a subscription-based web business. Towards the end, you will look at marketing and monetizing this business fully to maximize your return.
This step by step guide will show you how to build and customize a unique web site with Joomla! using the same techniques as the professionals
ApproachFilled with plenty of examples and careful explanations, this step-by-step guide teaches you to build a subscription-based business site with Joomla!. This site will evolve chapter by chapter as you apply the techniques and theory that you are learning to it. You will start by looking at the environment in which you develop, setting yourself up with the right tools to develop a professional site as effectively and efficiently as possible. Then you will move on to setting the purpose of our site, and why it is important to have a clear purpose and goals for your site before you ever even install Joomla!.
You will begin to look through choosing, installing and customizing extensions, and proceed to work on your sample subscription site as a practical example of the information covered in each chapter.
Finally you will look at how to market and monetize your site to ensure the maximum success for your site.
Who this book is forThis book is written for people with basic knowledge of Joomla! who want to expand their skills and move from simply assembling extensions and installing a template to truly customizing their own site.
Readers are expected to have functional knowledge of Joomla! and a very basic understanding of terms such as FTP, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, even if they have no real knowledge of the workings behind these terms. This book does not cover topics such as installing Joomla! and extensions, or creating content.
The ideal reader is one who wishes to build a successful business web site using Joomla! and is interested in making as well as saving money by applying professional tools and techniques to the development, monetization, and marketing of their site. Non-business focussed site owners can still benefit greatly from the book, however, if they wish to add a level of professionalism to their work.