What this book covers

Chapter 1 The Skills Required to Customize Joomla!—You will be given a clear understanding of why Joomla! came to be and how it fits into the Internet ecosystem, and how the technologies of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL fit together to help you produce your site.

Chapter 2 Setting Up Our Environment—Here, you will be introduced some of the tools and the environment used by professionals to ensure that their work is done as swiftly as possible while still maintaining top quality.

Chapter 3 Planning Our Site—Before we get into the actual building of the site, we will cover how to plan your site properly and why this is essential to a successful site. You will also be shown how to choose the best extensions for building your desired site.

Chapter 4 Installing and Configuring Extensions—Here, you will see how to clean out a new Joomla! installation of unneeded content and extensions, then how to install and configure most of your extensions. We will also begin work on our example site.

Chapter 5 Installing and Modifying Templates—Here we will show you how to find, choose, and then customize a template to match the needs of your site, making changes to the HTML, CSS, PHP, and images.

Chapter 6 Customizing Modules—After templates we will look at how to customize the functionality and appearance of modules so that they can do what we need. You will be shown how a Joomla! module is designed and built.

Chapter 7 Customizing Plugins—In a similar style to Chapter 6, we will look at how plugins operate within Joomla, and then at how to modify the output of a content plugin.

Chapter 8 Customizing Components—The most difficult of extensions to modify, components, are made clear in this chapter. You will understand how to identify the differences between traditional style and modern style Joomla! components and then make changes to one to better suit our site.

Chapter 9 Finding and Fixing Problems—Here we will look a some of the common problems Joomla! web site developers face, and the ways we can solve them.

Chapter 10 Promoting and Tracking—In this chapter you will learn different methods for promoting and marketing your web site successfully, and how to track that success.

Chapter 11 Monetizing Our Site—The final chapter will go over some different methods for monetizing your site, extending what we have done in our sample site.