Datasheet

❑ Publish a political opinion blog site with reference to every kind of supporting documentation
for your point of view — at the same time polling your readers to find out the topics they think
are important.
❑ Get in on the lucrative field of setting up other people’s CMS deployments. The information in
this book will give you the competitive edge.
❑ Start a personal Web site with picture galleries (of your kids, special events, and so on) and
forums where your relatives can stay in touch.
This book will give you the knowledge to pursue all of these diverse paths, and more. In this exciting
new world where many grandmothers know HTML, the limits of mastering Joomla are set mostly by
your ambition. Joomla makes even difficult development, if not a joy, at least rewarding. It also opens
the gateway to CMS development in the same way that CMS applications are beginning to bring order
to the chaos of Web site maintenance.
Flexibility Makes Joomla the CMS of Choice
Before CMS applications became widespread, the Web was beginning to buckle under the weight of the
vast amount of content that needed to be managed. Creating a site of individual pages was severely limit-
ing and made maintenance of even a medium-sized Web site incredibly expensive in time and resources.
Custom-designed sites with dynamic coded execution using PHP or Active Server Pages (ASP) were not
only expensive to implement, but the potential for severe bug problems and security breaches made them
a precarious solution.
CMSs such as Joomla dramatically reduce the maintenance costs for large and small Web sites alike. By
organizing all of the content in a database and separating it as much as possible from the presentation
aspects and the program code, much greater administrative flexibility is available through a CMS than
most other methods of Web site deployment.
The Joomla CMS leverages technology to create a system that is not one-size-fits-all, but instead one-size-
modifiable-to-fit-anyone. Joomla is robust enough that it can be modified, extended, and expanded to handle
a majority of all needed Web solutions.
Just because Joomla can fill nearly every Web need doesn’t mean that it should be
used in this fashion. There’s an old saying that when you’re a hammer, everything
looks like a nail. There are applications where using Joomla would not be the best
choice. For that reason, I’ve included Chapter 15, “What Joomla Can’t Do.” It is
important to understand the shortcomings of any program, especially before you
begin a large project.
Many of Joomla’s limitations (such as fine granular security) can be overcome with a
combination of custom coding and available extensions. It is up to you to determine
if surmounting these boundaries is even wise to attempt, or whether it might not be
a better idea to choose another application with out-of-the-box features more appro-
priate to your project.
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Chapter 1: Introducing Joomla!
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