I don’t know what Joomla!® stands for; but the word “Joomla جملة” in Arabic means “sentence or clause”! It also means “lump or wholesale,” in another context. Regardless of its etymology, Joomla! is the content management system (CMS) used for this labsite (at least until now) and for the PhAnToMe website as well.
Needless to say, we (hmm.. at least I and someone else) are learning Joomla! by the golden method: trial and error. Being a good CMS, Joomla! is modular and felxible, with almost no usable defaults. And, while the Joomla! features always seem obvious and straightforward once we discover them, I thought to write some of them down because I WILL forget them when I need them again.
- Admin is no longer a top-rank position. You need to be a Super Admin to do things from the back-end. You can’t change the configuration unless you’re a Super Admin. For example, to make the links look pretty (i.e., http://phantome.org/index.php/phantomers instead of http://www.phantome.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7:who-are-we&catid=8:current&Itemid=14).
- Golden rule: Almost everything in Joomla needs to be set as a ‘Section’ (sometimes a Category is crucial too) and then as a ‘menu item’ to be visible even if it’s ‘published.’ Many features won’t appear until a Module is activated for them. For example, you may have a very well set–and published–Main Menu, but it won’t actually appear on the site until you activate the Main Menu module, and tell it where to put the menu (and this is largely dependent on your template–some templates will not show your menu if you choose to put it at the ‘top’).
- There is a Web Links option in the Components menu of the administrator page. No need to re-invent the wheel. When you get this one activated, you can create a menu item that belongs to ‘Web Link Category List Layout,’ and this one will show the web links.
To be continued