This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Make Your First Joomla Site Changes
Now that you know a little about navigating through the Joomla administrator area, let's see how easy it is to make some changes to your site.
Changing Your First Article
Let's add a welcome article on the visitor page so that people can find out about your city.
- In the drop-down menu, click on Content, then Article Manager, and then click on New. You see a screen like in Figure 3.13. This is where you will write all your articles in Joomla.
Figure 3.13 Creating a new Joomla article
- There are only three settings that we need to use for this article:
- 1: Title. A good choice would be "Welcome to Joomlaville."
- 2: Featured. Select Yes so that this will appear on the front page.
- 3: Article Text. http://www.joomlaexplained.com/chapter3 has some text that you can use for this article. You can copy and paste the text from that site into your new article. Before you do so, I have a note of caution: Copying and pasting text is always somewhat tricky. Some programs such as Microsoft Word are notorious for creating a lot of bad formatting with their articles. My suggestion would always be to type directly into Joomla. However, if you do copy-and-paste, always start by copying from the article and pasting into a text editor like WordPad or Notepad. That clears away the formatting. You can then copy the code out of the editor and paste into Joomla.
Figure 3.14 Writing your first Joomla article
- When you're happy with the article, click Save & Close in the top-right corner. This saves all the changes you made.
- Then in very top-right corner, above the Save & Close button, click on View Site. This sends you to the visitor area of your site. You can see both the Save & Close and the View Site buttons in Figure 3.15.
Figure 3.15 Saving your first Joomla article
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In the visitor area, you now can see your first Joomla article live on your site. Figure 3.16 shows how it will appear.
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Figure 3.16 Your first Joomla article is now published.
Great! You now know how to welcome people to your new Joomlaville site. However, the heading across the top of the site still reads "Joomla! Open Source Content Management." Let's go ahead and change that to reflect our new content.
Changing Your First Template
Now let's change the design of the site so that visitors can clearly see the word Joomlaville.
- Go back to the administrator area of your site.
- In the drop-down menu, click on Extensions and then Template Manager.
- Either click on the Beez2-Default name or select the box next to Beez2-Default and click Edit in the top-right corner. You see a screen like Figure 3.17.
Figure 3.17 Editing a Joomla template
- On the right-hand side under Advanced Options there are several things you can change. Here are some first steps:
- Logo. Click Clear to remove the Joomla logo from the header.
- Site Title. Enter Joomlaville.
- Site Description. Enter A great place to live!
Figure 3.18 Editing a Joomla template
- When you're happy with the changes, click Save & Close in the top-right corner. This saves all the changes you made.
- In the very top-right corner, above the Save & Close button, click on View Site. This sends you to the visitors area of your site.
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You can see both the Save & Close and the View Site buttons in Figure 3.19.
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Figure 3.19 Saving your Joomla template
In the visitors area you now can see your template changes live on your site. Figure 3.20 shows how it will appear.
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Figure 3.20 Your Joomla template changes are live.
Your whole site at the end of Chapter 3 should now look like Figure 3.21.
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Figure 3.21 Your Joomla site at the end of Chapter 3
Great! You made your first Joomla site changes. You published an article and modified the template. You're ready for the next step—to start building your first Joomla site.