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Although Joomla debuted in 2005 as version 1.0, its roots stretch back to 2001 when the open source content management system (CMS) named Mambo was first released. Mambo began life as an internal CMS product created by engineers at the Miro Corporation of Australia. In April 2001, Mambo was initially released to the open source community. For its time, Mambo was an amazingly advanced CMS application to be freely available with full source code.

Mambo gained worldwide popularity and spawned a cottage industry of vendors selling plug-ins and templates. The developer community flourished in an environment where people could freely share ideas and source code. Mambo was well on its way to becoming the most popular open source CMS application.

Yet in 2005 there was a substantial disagreement between the open source developers of Mambo and the nonprofit foundation that had been created to guide Mambo development. Finally in August 2005, the Mambo development staff abandoned the Mambo project and began toiling to create a new CMS from the ashes of the old.

A short time later, Joomla 1.0 was released. While this new CMS was fundamentally compatible with most aspects of Mambo, the user interface and site management had been streamlined. The problems with the Mambo foundation caused the open source community to shun that product and throw all their weight behind Joomla development.

In the short time since Joomla was born, use and development of the CMS has exploded. Within its first year of release, Joomla was downloaded more than 2.5 million times. At the time of this writing, there are over 65,000 registered Joomla developers, and there are countless web sites deployed with Joomla. Even more amazing is the international embrace of Joomla. The Joomla CMS has been adopted by webmasters from Brazil to the Netherlands, from the United States to Italy, and from Australia to China.

Joomla (we’re dropping the final exclamation point from Joomla! in the text of this book, following the convention in other books and making this book more readable) gives you total control of your Web site the layout, the navigation menus, the text, everything. And this book gives you total control of Joomla.

Today, users are demanding more from Web sites. It’s not enough to have static text on your Web site not if you want a steady stream of visitors. You’ve got to update your pages continually, making your site fresh and

keeping it new. You’ve got to have an attractively, professionally formatted site. You’ve got to have tons of extras: polls and e-mail signups and news-flashes and menus, and more.

Who can afford the time to maintain a site like that and write the content too?

Now you can. Content management systems (CMSes) like Joomla are coming to the rescue, letting people put together spectacular sites with very little work.

Want to publish a new article on your site? No problem. Want to let users rate your articles with a clickable bar of stars? Also no problem. Want to link your articles with a cool system of drop-down menus? No trouble. Want to let people log into your site to gain special privileges? No worries. Want to let users search every page on your site? Yep no problem at all.

CMSes are all the rage on the Internet these days: They give you the complete framework of a Web site and allow you to manage it professionally with a few clicks. All you have to do is provide the content such as text, images, and videos that you want to display. Using a CMS is as easy as typing in a word processor (in fact, one way to think of CMSes is as word processors for the Web) but a lot more fun.

The CMS of choice these days is Joomla, which is what this book is all about. Joomla is free and dramatically powerful. Want a site that looks as though a Fortune 500 company is behind it? Coming right up in just a few minutes. You’re going to find that Joomla is not only free but also remarkably trouble free.

In the old days, you had to build your own site from scratch using HTML. These days, Joomla takes care of all the details for you, allowing you to con-centrate on the content of your site instead of struggling with the details of how that content is presented.

eBook

As a major force in the world of affordable, advanced web site deployment, Joomla! has become the most important noncommercial Content Management System (CMS) in the world. The number of Joomla! downloads and add-ons continues to grow at lightning pace, spurring the need for a resource that explores the diverse needs of professional Joomla! developers. This book fills that void by covering the two main areas of the Joomla! field--development and deployment--with a focus on the new Joomla! version 1.5 and all the features it provides.

Seasoned author Dan Rahmel walks you through the process of creating all three types of Joomla! extensions (modules, components, and plug-ins), explains how best to use Ajax technology, and shows you how to adopt design patterns and incorporate source code control. You'll examine the underlying technologies (PHP, Apache, etc.) that can be tuned to offer the best system performance, and you'll explore interfacing with outside content, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) setup, and much more. You'll even delve into the internal structure of the Joomla! framework, and obtain a unique behind-the-scenes education so that you can modify and extend Joomla! to meet the needs of you and your customers.

What you will learn from this book

• How each server of a Joomla! system can be installed and configured for maximum performance
• The process of creating a module from scratch
• Ways to use Ajax to add dynamic data retrieval to Joomla!
• Techniques for using design patterns to solve common programming problems
• How to create and retain a virtual community
• Procedures for tuning a Joomla! site for both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Management (SEM)

Who this book is for

This book is for web developers, hobbyists, web designers, bloggers, corporate content creators, and support specialists who are looking to build a more robust web site. Basic skills in the area of PHP programming are necessary.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.