4 Things to Master Joomla
- Details
- Written by Luis Posselt
In my point of view, there are only a few things that you should really understand in order to master Joomla.
If you want to grasp the general idea behind developing Joomla Sites, try to focus your attention inside the following 4 recommendations.
First of all I have to say that Yes!, when you install Joomla and visit the Administrator Panel for the first time, you will find a lot of places to go around, but in practice you will probably never use most of the functionality in there.
Content, Menus, Extensions, and Templates Positions are the main factors that you should get right away in order to develop websites in Joomla. Now of course there are going to be more places to go inside the Administrator, but those are small places that you will learn with the normal use of Joomla, nothing to worry at this point.
So let’s go ahead and take a quick look to these 4 things.

1. Extensions
So what are extensions? If you are familiar with Wordpress, extensions are like plugins.
They will integrate inside Joomla and will add especial abilities to the software. In Wordpress you will have an eCommerce plugin to convert Wordpress in a shopping cart.
Well my friends, in Joomla, you will have plugins too, however they are going to be called extensions. As you can see Joomla is not that different from Wordpress.
The only difference is that Joomla will have three (3) different types of extensions; which are going to be Components, Modules, and Plugins.

2. Content
In here you will actually create the articles you are going to display inside your website.
You will find inside this section 2 different parts to go which are Categories, and Articles.
You can basically eliminate Categories if you want to make your site less complicated.
But implementing Categories is a wise decision because they are going to make your website more organized.
(Side Note: In Joomla 1.5, you will have Sections but they are gone inside Joomla 2.5.)

3. Menus
Inside the menus, you will be able to link your articles and some extensions. This process will let you display the information inside your website.
The menu links are going to display whatever you link to them. If you link an article, it will display an article. If you link an extension, it will display an extension.

4. Template Positions
To check the templates position of any Joomla template you will need to add “?tp=1” at the end of your website. Ex. http://www.mysite.com/?tp=1
Templates’ Positions are very important because they are going to allow you move Menu Links and extensions around your templates.
Overall this will help you with the look of your website. Now this can seems too much information, but it is not. Believe me is worth it learning this software.
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