Joomla is undoubtedly one of the best CMS frameworks around. It is good fun to play with and you can end up with really professional web pages since its learning curve is not that steep. With tones of customizable extensions around (modules, components and plugins) you can get additional functionality embedded on your website really fast. Would you ever need to build your own extensions? Well, only you can answer this question yet this is what this place is all about. The truth is, while you are using Joomla you will constantly come up with new ideas for various things. This is due to the existing work performed by the Joomla community is great and very inspiring itself.

Do you need to get to the bare bones of Joomla? Really depends on what you want to build, the more you know, the more flexible you are to provide more functionality or to improve the look and feel of your site, always for attracting and pleasing users and visitors. The tutorials you will find here attempt to assist you in that.

If you are here without knowing what Joomla is, you may want to check Wikipedia and the official Joomla website. If you have done that I suggest you download and install Joomla on a Linux box after having installed PHP, Apache and MySQL. You can have Joomla on Windoze as well but, the flexibility you get with Linux is incomparable. If you have time in your hands I suggest you search around on how to install Ubuntu on a box, you will find it is much easier than you think it is.

Joomla is good, it is very good but in my opinion it has a single drawback: There is not enough documentation around. If you really want to get into it, you need to search a lot, you need to improve your patience with the forums; waiting for an answer and eventually you need to think and hack. These last bits are not necessarily bad, with website design you can just press the browser’s refresh button and you will get feedback on your latest alteration. Of course, having fast feedback on your mistakes may prevent you from thinking but I reckon you will find your way around.

The last thing I would like to stress out is that you don’t have any chances in learning only by reading stuff. Of course reading tech articles and code is much better than reading the news these days but remember, at some point you have to sit down and try things out, make mistakes. Not all who wonder are lost Mr. Frodo.

Now, I may have convinced you that I am a pro talking with confidence about a subject I master very well. Sorry, I am not. Also, I am not a salesman and I don’t come from the states. I doubt about things. I am a newbie with Joomla, databases, PHP and CSS and I think this is the single best qualification I have in writing good down to earth tutorials about Joomla.

I will end it here, before this introduction gets too long …

Have fun!

Victor Behar