Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5, 2nd Edition: Amazon.co.uk: Hagen Graf: Books

Product Description

This book takes a practical step-by-step approach of teaching the installation and configuration of Joomla! 1.5, customizing it, creating your templates and extensions, and finally, building your own website.

In Detail

Joomla! started as a fork from Mambo in 2005, when many of the original developers of the Mambo CMS moved to working on Joomla! It has rapidly grown in popularity and, according to its own description, is a "Cutting Edge Content Management System and one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management systems in the world. It is used world-wide for anything from simple homepages to complicated corporate websites. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable."

While the Joomla! CMS has the flexibility and power needed for complex, full-featured web applications, it is also simple to use to create basic websites. Its powerful, extensible template system can deal many different data types and control of user access, approval of content, scheduling of content display, and rich administrative controls are all included.

Approach

This book takes the reader through the tasks essential to create a Joomla! website as rapidly as possible. The necessary tasks are explained with clear step-by-step instructions. The author’s chatty and engaging style makes this book very readable.

Who this book is written for

This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors, and marketing professionals who want to develop a website in a simple and straightforward process. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT-confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive website.

About the Author

Hagen Graf was born in July 1964. Born and raised in Lower Saxony, Germany, his first contact with a computer was in the late seventies with a Radioshack TRS 80. As a salesperson, he organized his customers' data by programming suitable applications. This gave him a big advantage over other salesmen. With the intention of honing his skills, he joined evening courses in programming and became a programmer. Nowadays he works in his wife's consulting company as a trainer, consultant, and programmer (http://www.cocoate.com). Hagen Graf has published other books in German, about the Apache web server, about security problems in Windows XP, about Mambo, and about Drupal. Since 2001, he has been engaged in a nonprofit e-learning community called "machm-it.org e.V.", as well as in several national and international projects. All the projects are related to content management, community building, and harnessing the power of social software like wikis and weblogs. He chose Joomla! CMS because of its simplicity and easy-to-use administration. You can access and comment on his blog (http://www.bloghouse.org/en/hagen).

Customer Reviews

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5 Stars ?, I think not 18 July 2008

By Mr. Keith Sterling

Format:Paperback

Not entirely sure how the previous reviewer could give this a 5 star rating, this book is not very good.

I bought on the basis of the review thinking it will give me a tutorial and examples based development.

In fact all it is is a glorified user manual that explains what each page in the admin section does, and not that well in most cases

Don't buy this book if you want an decent introduction to Joomla or an example driven explanation of how to actually build a website. If you do, you'll might as well skip to the last chapter and even then its just about good enough to explain some of the basics

Total waste of money in my opinion, you are better of with Barrie M. North book than this thing

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

A waste of money (apart from the donation to Joomla) 23 July 2008

By UK Bookworm

I was misled into buying this book by the first reviewer. I found the book incredibly superficial, badly written and badly edited. I was not expecting to get all that much from the first chapters as I have been using Joomla for several years, but if you're new to Joomla you'd be far better off reading some of the online tutorials than this book. The later chapters which I bought the book for (for example on creating templates) are so superficial and random as to be completely unusable.

That this books is so poor is a real shame as Joomla is a truly amazing content management system and deserves a far better book than this.

I don't know how Packt go about choosing their authors and quality control, but if I were them I'd have another think.

The only positive out of this is that some of the purchase price goes to Joomla as a donation, but frankly you'd be better off donating to Joomla directly.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

Do not waste your money on this poor book 29 July 2008

By Peter Button

The negative comments by other reviewers are spot on.

I would only add that this is a badly structured and poorly written book that has been translated badly from the original German.

I returned my copy to Amazon immediately.