Joomla! Community Magazine™

Last month the magazine editors asked me to stop writing the series of articles for non-technologists because they determined that the objective had been achieved. I undertook the following article considering a more techy audience. After talking to the Spanish magazine team about writing articles that facilitate developers’ access to classes which allow us to build on Joomla using Joomla, the idea for this article arose. So I will try to write for those programmers who already have some knowledge ... although perhaps not yet the depth of knowledge that they want, all that Joomla offers to make your work more comfortable.

This article is written as a continuation of those published in this magazine in November 2013 and January 2014. It is highly recommended to read these articles before venturing into the pleasant adventure of knowing what this article is going to be about. Why… What are we going to talk about in the next lines? We will discuss the process which Joomla generates to show information in my browser when you click anywhere.

Let's continue with our series of articles on Joomla for non-technologists. In the previous article we saw what the “extensions” are, such as templates, components, modules or plugins for our CMS. In this article we are going to start by understanding what occurs when installing Joomla on a server, and afterwards go a little further into some of the concepts which many times the technicians consider to be clear...

This month I'll try to clarify how Joomla works for users without any technical knowledge. We will start by defining Joomla as a CMS (Content Management System). That means that Joomla does... what? It's easy: Joomla allows you to manage any "content" on the internet which covers just about anything you can think of.

This article summarizes the first hour of my introductory course to Joomla. It's a bit "thick" as it’s about system architecture concepts for which the user does not normally have professional knowledge. So try to go slowly, be patient and don’t get discouraged. Draw the examples in the text, copy the pictures and you will see that in the end you had fun.

When we approach a development project based on the Joomla CMS, we must treat it in the same way as if it was any other development project. A common mistake is to compare the developments made with Open Source Software for Freelance (in our case Joomla) with other projects which involve full development teams.

Let's begin by asking ourselves what is the similarity of a web portal which offers online “Media Manager” courses and a virtual campus portal of a university with more than 4,000 professors, and more than 45,000 students enrolled in different courses?