A Pictorial Guide to Joomla! 1.0
7th Sin Digital Solutions Ltd Version 1.1 December 2007
Contents Contents ........................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 3 About Joomla .................................................................................................... 4 Joomla Concepts .............................................................................................. 5 Joomla Hosting ................................................................................................. 7 Joomla Performance ........................................................................................ 7 Joomla Security ................................................................................................ 8 How do I log in as an Administrator? ................................................................ 8 What is the Joomla Control Panel For? .......................................................... 10 How can I Quickly Log Users Out? ................................................................ 11 How can I Quickly Administer Components? .................................................. 12 How can I see my site’s most popular content items? .................................... 13 How do I view my site’s most recently added content items? ......................... 13 How do I quickly view my site’s menus? ......................................................... 14 How do I get back to the Control Panel? ........................................................ 14 How do I update my site’s Global Configuration? ........................................... 15 What can I change in the Global Configuration? ............................................ 17 The Site Tab ............................................................................................... 17 The Locale Tab ........................................................................................... 18 The Content Tab ......................................................................................... 19 The Database Tab ...................................................................................... 20 The Server Tab ........................................................................................... 21 The Metadata Tab ....................................................................................... 22 The Mail Tab ............................................................................................... 23 The Cache Tab ........................................................................................... 24 The Statistics Tab ....................................................................................... 25
The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tab .............................................. 26 What are language files? ................................................................................ 26 How do I add languages to my site? ............................................................... 27 How do I upload images, sound files and video to my site? ........................... 29 How do I preview my site? .............................................................................. 31 How do I see my site’s statistics? ................................................................... 33 How do I administer my site’s templates? ...................................................... 34 How do I add a new template to my site? ....................................................... 37 Can I change the administration template in the same way as I change my site template? ................................................................................................ 44 Can I define custom Module Positions? ......................................................... 44 Can I recover content that I’ve accidentally deleted? ..................................... 47 How can I reset a user’s password? ............................................................... 52 How Does Joomla Store Passwords? ............................................................ 55 How do I add/edit existing users? ................................................................... 55 What are the user groups/roles? ................................................................... 57 How do I manage menus? .............................................................................. 59 How do I create a new Menu Item? ............................................................... 62 What are sections and categories? ................................................................ 67 What is static content? ................................................................................... 67 How do I view all of my site’s dynamic content? ............................................. 67 How do I create or edit a content Item? .......................................................... 70 The Publishing Tab ..................................................................................... 71 The Images Tab .......................................................................................... 72 The Parameters Tab ................................................................................... 75 The Meta Info Tab ....................................................................................... 78 The Link To Menu Tab ................................................................................ 78 How do I view content in a particular section? ................................................ 80 How do I manage content items on my site’s front page? .............................. 81 How do I download and install a new extension? ........................................... 83 What is in a template? .................................................................................... 90 Security .......................................................................................................... 91 Backups .......................................................................................................... 94
Introduction This is a pictorial guide to using Joomla 1.0. That means that it will show you how to administer Joomla mainly using pictures. To use this guide search the table of contents for the topic in question and click through to find the solution. The guide covers every aspect of basic Joomla administration but, while it will show you how to install third party components, modules and mambots (don’t worry if you don’t know what these are yet it will all be explained in the manual) it does not cover their use because there are literally thousands of third party Joomla components available. This guide is intended to be a basic beginner’s reference for the administration of Joomla 1.0.and may not be reproduced or distributed without the prior consent of 7th Sin Digital Solutions Ltd and is strictly copyright controlled.
About Joomla Joomla is a Content Management System (CMS). It allows you to build a very dynamic website whilst separating the look and fee of the site from the content. It can be managed completely via a browser and any updates are done in real time. It relies on a number of technologies. Firstly there is a database to store and quickly retrieve the content of your site. It would be possible to use almost any database however the designers of Joomla have currently tied it in to the MySQL database system. In order to talk to the database you need a programming language. Joomla is written in a language called PHP which is a fairly good, fairly standard programming language that has grown from the simplicity of its early days to being an almost fully fledged Object Orientated language suitable for most software engineering tasks. PHP’s job is to talk to the database to get and update information and to display the right information to the right user on the right Joomla page. The machine on which PHP and MySQL run is called a server (it is usually the same machine but it does not have to be). Your web browser connects to a
web server program (usually Apache) over the internet using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or its secure cousin HTTPS. The web server then passes your request off to the Joomla PHP code which talks to the database and returns your page. Joomla has two sides to its personality. The frontend is the web pages that most users see. The administrator backend (or just backend) is a secure area that you, and other people who you allow to administer your site, can log into, again using a web browser. You can use this administration interface to accomplish many tasks on your site such as adding and updating content (Joomla calls articles content or content items) menus, templates (the skin or look and feel of your site), languages, modules (plugin PHP code that provides parts of a web page for example a login form), components (whole applications that you can display within your Joomla site, mambots (PHP code that updates your page for example by changing part of your text or inserting images into your content) etc. etc.
Joomla Concepts Joomla evolved from a project called Mambo and still maintains some of Mambo’s naming conventions, although these are mostly disappearing in Joomla 1.5. Where you see the letters “MOS” pertaining to something in Joomla this is a historical throwback standing for “Mambo OpenSource”. In order to understand Joomla there are 9 simple concepts you need to grasp: 1. Joomla does not think in terms of web pages, instead it thinks in terms of menu items. So typically to see a new Joomla Page you associate that page with a menu. This helps Joomla to know what to display on the page apart from the main page content. 2. Joomla can be extended using third party addons. 3. If the addon is an entire application, such as Hot Property or Phila Form it is called a “Component”. 4. If the addon just generates a small part of the screen it is called a “Module”.
5. If the addon physically alters the text on your site it is called a “mambot”. The most common mambot is one that puts images into your site content using a mambot called mosimage. 6. Any item in Joomla can be in a published or unpublished state. If it is unpublished it exists in the database but is not yet seen on the main site. 7. Joomla content is accessed using a surprisingly complicated URL, such as http://www.gcph.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id =37&Itemid=53. The format of this URL can be made much more friendly using third party components for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). 8. Joomla articles are called “Content Items”. 9. Joomla Administrator forms have buttons which live in a section near the top right of the screen called the “toolbar”, rather than at the bottom of the form. There are useful articles available on improving the format of these URLs, using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) components that change the URL into something less abstruse. The key thing about the standard Joomla URLs is that the URL specified both the content item (that’s the id= part) and the menu item that should be used to display the content item. The menu is important because the menu item also defines the modules that should be displayed. However when Joomla URLs define the menu item to use they rather obscurely use “Itemid=” instead of “Menuid=”. You just need to know the Itemid refers to the menu id, that is the identification number of a specific menu item in some menu. For the record the “option=” part of the URL tells Joomla what component to use and the “task=” part of the URL tells the component what task to perform.
The Joomla administration interface is a little unusual in that when you fill in a form in the interface the submit button (and other buttons) are not at the
bottom of the form, but are located on a toolbar near the top of the screen, just below the menus. This can take a little getting used to. Whenever you make a change using the Joomla Administration Interface remember to check that the change has not adversely affected your site. View your site frontend and make sure it looks okay.
Joomla Performance Performance tuning is a complicated subject, however the main performance consideration on any computer system is to avoid waiting for data to be read from disk. In order to do this the operating system caches as much data in memory as possible, so the best computer upgrade you can buy is almost always more memory. Think about it this way. Memory IO is about 1 000 000 times faster then disk IO. Suppose your system needed to do 1 seconds worth of memory IO but was running short of memory so it had to do disk IO instead. That would take about 1 000 000 times longer i.e. about 1 000 000 seconds (i.e. over 11 days!). When Joomla generates a page it does many IO operations, both to the filesystem and to the database. Therefore you should enable caching in the cache tab of the global configuration. This will allow Joomla to shortcircuit many of the IO operations. Other performance issues revolve around PHP code caching and database performance and table indexing. If you have a shared hosting solution then you may not be able to control much because performance issues can be caused by other users of your shared host. Nevertheless the default configuration of Joomla/MySQL performs reasonably well without further tuning.
Joomla Security Joomla Security is an extremely important area. However it is quite technical so we‘ll deal with it at the end of the guide.
How do I log in as an Administrator? Sometimes your site will have a link or a button taking you to the administrator login page. Otherwise use your browser to go to: http://www.yoururl.whatever/administrator
The administrator username is usually “admin”, but you can change this. Enter your password and click on the Login button. If you forget your administrator password you will probably need some help from a database administrator. If this happens and you have a support aggreement in place please contact 7th Sin support using the usual contact method.
When you have successfully logged in, you arrive at the administration control panel:
You can always get back to the Control Panel page by clicking on the “Home” button on the left of the menu:
What is the Joomla Control Panel For? The Control Panel is the first screen that you see when you log into Joomla as an administrator. It is full of shortcuts to help you to administer Joomla
quickly. On the left of the screen are twelve large icons that take you to relevant parts of the administration system.
On the right is a tabbed panel with the tabs “Logged”, “Components”, “Popular”, “Latest Items” and “Menu Stats”.
How can I Quickly Log Users Out? From the Control Panel, look for the “Logged” tab. This lists each user that is logged into your site (of course there may be many more who are not logged in). Click on the icon next to any users you want to log out.
How can I Quickly Administer Components?
From the Control Panel page click on the Components tab on the right of the page. Alternatively click on the Components menu and select the component you want to update.
How can I see my site’s most popular content items? From the Control Panel page, click on the Popular tab on the right of the page. Alternatively click on the Content menu and select the Page Impressions option at the bottom of the menu.
How do I view my site’s most recently added content items?
From the Control Panel, click on the “Latest Items” tab on the right of the page. You can click through on the content items to edit them.
How do I quickly view my site’s menus?
From the Control Panel, click on the Menu Stats tab on the right of the screen. You can also click on the ironically named Menu menu then select “Menu manager”.
How do I get back to the Control Panel? Some administrator actions grey out the menu. This is very annoying. You need to save or cancel out of them to get the menu system working again. When it is you can click on the “Home” menu item to get back to the Control Panel.
How do I update my site’s Global Configuration? From the Control Panel click on the Global Configuration icon
Or from the menus click on “Site > Global Configuration”.
Here is the global configuration screen:
Roll you mouse over the blue icons to get a tooltip containing more information on what each option does. In order to update your site’s configuration your configuration.php file must be writable. If it is not writable there will be a warning at the top of the screen. You can not update your site’s configuration unless the configuration.php file
is writable, so unless you are fortunate enough to have secure shell access to your server, you may need to use FTP to change the permissions on the file. If you find that you are having to update file permissions on your site regularly then contact 7th Sin support with a view to installing the joomlaXplorer file manager component for your site Note the Help button on the toolbar. It causes a popup with help on the current screen to appear in your browser window.
What can I change in the Global Configuration? In the Global Configuration there is an amazing amount of things you can do to configure your site, ten tabs of screens that you can change: The Site Tab The site tab contains general settings for your site. You can take your site offline, leaving an impressive message at the top of your site:
I suggest that you take time to look at all of the tooltip help for the Site screen. Pass your cursor over the blue icons to see the tooltip.
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The 4 option down ion the Site tab is your site name. This will appear in your sites title element (at the top of the browser screen). It’s a big hint to search engines so you should use it. Other options set up whether users can register on your site and what you require of them (e.g. a unique email address), whether users can log in to your site etc. The debug option should not be used on a live site. We suggest that you have at least two Joomla installations, www.yourdomain.com and test.yourdomain.com Should you require to use the debugging function. Your site should have a favicon.ico file. This will make it stand out more. See favicon.com or search for favicon on WikiPedia for more information. There are numerous third party WYSIWYG Editors available for Joomla. You select them on this screen.
The Locale Tab The Locale tab is used to set up the time zone and language for the site: There is a section on adding language files later in this guide.
The Content Tab
The content tab controls how articles (content) on your site are displayed. This screen sets up the default values. These can be overridden for each article.
The Database Tab
The database tab sets up the configuration for accessing your database. It is a little spurious because if any of the information in it is wrong you won’t get as far as seeing the screen.
Just for completeness, the fields on the database tab are the host name of the host that runs your database. This is almost always “localhost” or 127.0.0.1 which is the name or address respectively, by which your server refers to itself. The database could be on a different server which may be a useful performance enhancement is some specialised environments. Other fields are the username and password used to access the database. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot then change any of the values on this screen then press save and kiss your site goodbye! Finally there is the database table prefix which is usually “jos_”. The reason for having this is that it is then possible to run several Joomla sites with one database, just give the tables for the sites different prefixes and it will work. However this is only necessary if your web host is mean and limits the number of databases available to you. The Server Tab
The server tab contains several server level options (and some path information that you can not change).
You should select the option to gzip your output as it is a major performance advantage, particularly if your user community is over slow communication lines or you have limited serverside bandwidth. The session lifetimes should be as short as possible for security reasons, but not so short as to annoy any logged in users. The session lifetimes are the times that a user can be logged in without activity before they have to re authenticate themselves. On test and development servers (i.e. non live servers) these can be set to be high values as it is annoying to have to keep logging in again and again, however for live servers it is recommended to keep the value low. The option to “Remember Expired Admin Page” can usefully be set to “yes” so that you end up in the right place if your session times out (see the session lifetime settings, above). The other options on the page should not be changed unless you know what you are doing. The Metadata Tab
This contains the site metadata that shows up in the head section of your site’s html. It is also used by search engines when indexing your site so the information you enter is necessary and important.
The Mail Tab
The mail tab specifies the mechanism by which your site sends out emails. There are three possibilities: Using the PHP mailer, Using sendmail (this may not be available on windows server platforms because sendmail is a unix/linux program, Using SMTP Server (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). If you use SMTP you may have to add your SMTP username and password. You can also set up the replyto email address that appears when people receive an email from your site, for example the acknowledgement email which is automatically sent when they register on your site. If everything is working do not change this screen.
The Cache Tab
The cache is an extremely important part of your site’s ability to perform. Joomla can simply go to the cache for pages or parts of pages that it needs, instead of running many database queries to generate your page. (It is amazing how much database work Joomla does, and it’s a real testimony to MySQL that is works as well as it does.) Ideally the cache should be enabled. Running your mouse over the icon will cause a tooltip to pop up telling you whether your cache directory is writable by the web server, of course it must be writable for caching to work. The cache timeout could be reduced for sites that change very regularly. If you set up caching you will get cache control options on the “System” menu which will be covered later.
The Statistics Tab
The statistics tab provides a section where you can set up data collection detailing hits on your site. You can view this information by clicking on “site” > “statistics” on the ain menu:
You can get this information in other ways, from your server log by example. You may also want to subscribe to other statistics services such as Google analytics.
The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tab
Search engine Optimization is extremely important. Switching this on changes the way your URLs are displayed into a more search engine friendly format, which means that your site should get indexed better by search engines. The SEO in Joomla 1.0 is not brilliant and there are several third party SEO components, both commercial and free, that do a much better job. Your site should also help search engines by having content titles in the site title (Set the “Dynamic Page Titles” radiobutton to “yes”.)
What are language files? Language files contain translations of specific phrases. This may be useful if you require to display your site in multiple selectable languages.
How do I upload images, sound files and video to my site? Select Site > Media Manager (You can also click on the Media Manager icon on the Control Panel).
This takes you to the Media Manager screen:
You can navigate folders by clicking on the folder icons. Running your cursor over the icons causes tooltip information to be displayed. If you click on one of the images you see a preview and you fill in the Image Code field with an HTML IMG tag. i.e. HTML that when placed in a web page would display the image.
You can create subfolders using the Create Directory input. Images that are to be used in content (Joomla articles) need to be placed under the “stories” folder as we shall see later. To navigate up the directory tree click on the
icon.
To upload media to a folder select the file you want to upload in the “File Upload” text input, then click on the upload icon in the toolbar.
How do I preview my site? Click on the Site > Preview
There are three options: “In New Window” launches the frontend of your site in a new window or tab for tabbed browsers. Inline shows your site as an iframe (inline frame/frameset) within the administrator site:
Inline with Positions displays the site in an iframe with module positions rather usefully litup:
See the section on site templates for more information on the module positions.
How do I see my site’s statistics?
Click on site > Statistics > Browser, OS, Domain
Click on the OS Stats tab:
And on the Domain Stats tab:
You should be able to get much better statistics from your web site logs.
How do I administer my site’s templates?
Click on Site > Template Manager > Site Templates. this takes you to the template manager screen:
You can see from the screen above that I’ve added a couple of templates to this site already. The template that is actually used is the mathsmentor template. You can change the default template by clicking on the appropriate radio button on the left of the screen and then clicking on the “Default” toolbar button.
The assign button allows you to link a template to a menu button. Its one way in which users can change the site template. You probably want to be very clear in your mind that you want this functionality, as maintaining one template can be a headache enough without maintaining several templates across all browsers. You can delete site templates using the delete icon. Joomla will stop you from deleting a template that is in use, which is probably a good thing as it means you can’t end up with a Joomla site with no active or no frontend template! The edit HTML and edit CSS toolbar buttons are fairly specialist options allowing you to edit the HTML and style sheets of your site’s templates. The idea of separating out the THML and style sheet is a standard web design thing rather than a Joomla thing. The HTML tells the site what should be displayed, the CSS defines how it should be displayed (fonts, positioning etc.) The template manager does not validate your HTML or CSS so it is quite possible to mess things up using these options. Always check out your site in several browsers (Iinternet Explorer 6 and 7 Opera and FireFox) if you update the template. If you click on the “preview template” checkbox on the top right of the screen then when your mouse rolls over the template names you see a neat preview of the template:
How do I add a new template to my site? Go to the template manager (select Site > Template Manager > Site Templates) and click on the “New” button in the toolbar.
This takes you to the template upload screen:
There’s quite a lot going on here. Firstly there is the warning about adding new third party software. In Joomla 1.0 the templates are actually PHP script files. If they haven’t been written properly or your server is misconfigured then the security of your site, and hence your server can be compromised. Next there is a section titled “Select Package File”. This allows you to locate the template on your local machine. When you get a new template it comes in a zip file. It contains the php files to drive the template, and XML file that tells Joomla what is in the template and other information such as who wrote the template. It can also contain images to display as part of the template, JavaScript files to drive the template and one or more cascading styles sheets, which tell your browser how to display the template. One word of warning is due here. It is very tempting to simply hack one of the default supplied Joomla templates insitu. This will work until you update your installation, which will overwrite the default templates and hence your site template ill be reset and you’ll be praying that you have a backup somewhere. If you want to do this properly copy the template files and folders to a local drive. Update the template xml file and zip the template contents. You can
then upload and reinstall the template with a new name, so it won’t get overwritten when you upgrade Joomla. The next section of the Template Installation Screen is an input box that lets you install a template from a zipped file that already exists on your server. Most people won’t use this. Finally there is a section that should say: media/
Writeable
administrator/templates/ Writeable templates/
Writeable
images/stories/
Writeable
If and of the directories specified are not writable they will show up in red. You should use the joomlaExplorer component or FTP (or ssh is you are fortunate enough to have ssh access) to change the permissions on these directories otherwise the template installation can fail. Enter the location of your template on your local machine/PC in the Upload Package File input box and click on the Upload File and Install button and your template should install. As an exercise I’ll temporarily change MathsMentor to use a free template from siteground.com: First go to the Template Manager:
Then select New:
And select the template zip file from your PC:
Click on the “Upload File and Install” button:
Everything went fine so we got a success message. Click on Continue.
We’ve hovered the pointer over the siteground link to see a preview of the template. Let’s make this the default template and have a look at the frontend: Click on the bullet point next to the siteground44 link then click on the “Default” toolbar icon:
Now let’s preview the site. Click on Site > Preview > In New window:
Here’s the site in its new skin:
Maybe a tad blue for some people so we’ll switch it back. Did you notice that the Google ads at the top of the page disappeared? That’s because we hard coded them into the template. They should have been a Joomla module then they
would probably have worked properly in the new template. We’ll be saying more about modules later on.
Can I change the administration template in the same way as I change my site template? Yes. It’s pretty much the same as changing the site template. Select “Site” > “Template manager” > “Administrator Templates” and follow the instructions (and warnings) for installing site templates.
Can I define custom Module Positions? Certainly! Lets have a go. Click on “Site” > “Template Manager” > “Module Positions”:
This takes you the Module Positions Screen.
Let’s add a test module position:
We’ve added a position called JoomlaBook. Click on save. Now let’s move some modules to this new position: Click on “Modules” > “Site Modules”
Now let’s look at a module and see if we can place it in the new position.
Here we’ve clicked on the banners module and then the Position selection box, and there it is “Just a Test for the Joomla Admin Book”.
To actually use this in your template you would need some code in your template’s index.php file that looks like this: <?php mosLoadModules( “joomlabook”, 1 );?> (The second parameter, 1 in this case, tells Joomla how to display the module.) Note that the module position is used in the template (the first parameter to mosLoadModules) but the module description is used in the module manager, unless there is no description in which case the position name is used.
Can I recover content that I’ve accidentally deleted? Let’s try: Select “Content” > “All content Items”
Here is the content manager.
Let’s zap something. I’ll select the Pancakes! Article and click on the “Trash” toolbar icon. Oops! It’s gone:
Note that you can select several content items at a time and Trash or Archive them. Lest see if we can get it back. Joomla tends to only update the status of content rather than actually throw it away so there’s a good chance it won’t end in tears. Select “Site” > “Trash Manager”:
Here’s the Trash manager Screen:
There’s the article. Click on the checkbox next to the article then on the Recover toolbar icon. Note that the trash manager also handles menu recovery (see the select list on the top right of the screen). Just in case we’re not sure Joomla gives us an intermediate screen:
Well we are sure otherwise we wouldn’t have clicked on Recover in the first place. Shame we didn’t have this screen when we deleted our precious content in the first place! Click on the Rest link on this screen:
Someone’s obviously got a sense of humour! Click on OK.
Restored at last! Lets go back to the content manager (“Content” > “All Content Items”)
Its back but its not published. Click on the next to the Pancakes! Article and it should be reappear on the frontend.
How can I reset a user’s password? Select “Site” > “User Manager” or the User Manager icon on the Control Panel:
Here’s the user Manager Screen:
Select the user you are looking for either by clicking on their name or on the checkbox next to their name and clicking on the Edit icon on the toolbar. If you have many users use the filter box at the top of the screen – enter part of the user’s name and hit Return/Enter.
Click on the user’s name and you get to the User Administration screen:
You can now enter the user’s new password. You have to enter it twice, in both the New Password and Verify Password fields, to verify your spelling. Finally click on the Save or Apply icons on the toolbar.
How Does Joomla Store Passwords? Joomla does not store plain text (unencrypted) passwords. Instead it transforms the password into something called a MD5 hash and stores the hash instead. For example if your password is “7thsindigital” the code that is actually stored in your Joomla database is: e7fec05e7c095b472d5f71ff1d7d5033
When a user logs in Joomla takes the MD5 hash of the password that they supply and compares it with the one in the database. It is pretty much impossible to reverse engineer the actual password from the MD5 hash and the chance of two passwords having different hashes is infinitesimal. However there are sites out there that can work out passwords from hashes. They do this by having a massive database of passwords and hashes. They can then look up the hash to see if it matches a password in their database
How do I add/edit existing users? Select “Site” > “User Manager” or the User Manager icon on the Control Panel:
Here’s the User Manager Screen:
There are various ways to find the user you want. (You * should * be able to click on the word “Name” underneath where it says “User Manager” to sort your users list alphabetically but in Joomla 1.0 this does not work. Its worth
trying on other screens though.
You can enter part of the user’s name in the Filter input box and hit Return/Enter to find users with that name. You can also search for users in a particular group or for users that are logged in. Joomla groups are explained in the next section. Select the user you are looking for either by clicking on their name or on the checkbox next to their name and clicking on the Edit icon on the toolbar. If you have many users use the filter box at the top of the screen – enter part of the user’s name and hit Return/Enter. Click on the user’s name (click on the New icon if you want an entirely new user) and you get to the User Administration screen:
You can now update the user.
What are the user groups/roles? User groups are divided into FrontEnd (your main web site pages) and Back End (The administrator pages).
Ordinarily a user is not logged into your site, and is generally described as a Guest. Once a user registers on your site they are normally placed in the “Registered” group. Once they log in they have the access permissions of a registered user, which allows them to look at both public content and content visible only to loggedin/registered users, update their profile etc. You can promote users to be in different groups using the User Administrator screen. The groups themselves are hierarchical so there no point in having users in more than one group as the highest privileged group should win. Groups and access control will be configured differently in Joomla 1.5. Site content is usually in one of three access levels, public (visible to all once the content is published), registered (visible to logged I users), special (only visible to users who have been promoted above the Author level. Author. An author can contribute content to your site. Editor. An editor can review and update any content item on your site. Publisher. A publisher can publish new content items. Manager. A manager can act as a Publisher on the frontend but can also log into the site’s administration area and update specific parts of the site particularly around content. Administrator. An Administrator can do most things on the site except what the super administrator can do. They can not, however administer components, templates, languages, messages, mass mail etc. SuperAdminsitrator. The SuperAdministrator is a user who has the same access rights as the default admin user. i.e. can access any part of the control panel and menus. In order for special frontend users to access the functionality they need you may have to add a menu item to let them get at their stuff.
How do I manage menus? You can add content directly to menus from within the Content Items Manager. I’ll deal with that later on in the sections on adding content. For now let’s look at the menu manager. Under the Menu menu are five or more options depending on how many menus you have configured:
The top option is “Menu Manager” the other options are short cuts to administering specific menus. Here’s the Menu Manager:
The menu manager shows you various statistics associated with each menu. From here you can copy, delete, edit and create new menus. If you edit a menu by clicking on its name or selecting the bullet point next to the name and clicking on the Edit toolbar icon you are taken to a screen where, rather frustratingly, all you can do is to change the name of the menu:
Not too useful. How do I edit the menus then? Well co back to the Menu menu and select the menu you want or click on the icon next to the menu in the Menu Manager. Let’s take a look at the site’s main menu;
There’s plenty going on here. You can publish and unpublish menu items. Unpublished items are not seen on the site. You can reorder the menu items using the blue and icons or by entering the order explicitly in the Order column (Remember to click on the floppydisc icon to save the new ordering). You can alter the access level of a menu item, remember public items can be seen by any user, registered by logged in registered users and special by anyone else who is logged in and has had their account promoted beyond the registered level. The ItemID and CID columns can be useful in handcrafting URLs for your site. The ItemID is really the unique menu ID, i.e. the ID number of this menu item. If you have many items on a menu the filter input box is useful to search for the one you want. Enter the text you want to search for and hit tab, or click off the filter input box, to run the search.
As we’ll see below it is possible to nest menu items to an arbitrary depth. The “Max Levels” selection allows you to limit your search to a specific depth. To see only top level menu items click on 1 in this box. If you hover your cursor over items in the “Type” column you get useful tooltip help that tells you more about what the menu item really is. It is possible to move menu items from one menu to another. Select the menu item you want to move then click on the “Move” button in the toolbar.
How do I create a new Menu Item? Starting in the menu Manager select the menu that you want to add an item to. In this case we’ll add a nested item to the main menu.
Click on the “New” toolbar icon:
The New Menu Item screen looks complicated. Roll your cursor over the possible menu item types. Here I’ll try adding a menu item pointing at a content item:
Let’s add a submenu item to the “How Many Dots on a Die?” item to take users through to the “Romanian Draughts” page that is otherwise difficult to find:
Click on the “Save” button on the toolbar:
Now then let’s take a look at the frontend:
I had to click through on this menu to get the submenu to show. Whether you have to do this depends on the menu system you are using. There are several menu components available.
What are sections and categories? Think of Sections as the drawers in a filing cabinet. Think of categories as the files with the drawers. Content goes into the files. So if you were writing a site containing Joomla books you may have sections for Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5 then within those sections you could have categories for User Guides, Administration Manuals, Programmers Guides, Template/Design Guides etc.
What is static content? Static content is content that does not change much. Things like terms and conditions for using your site and license agreements. Static content is not associates with sections or categories.
How do I view all of my site’s dynamic content? From the “content” menu click on “All Content Items” or from the Control Panel click on the “Content Items Manager” button:
Here’s the Content Manager:
Along the toolbar are a set of buttons that let you do things like: Archiving content – This is rather like deleting but the content is placed in an archive from where you can retrieve it if you want. It no longer shows up on the front end. Publishing – making content visible on the frontend. Unpublishing – removing content from the front end. Deleting – moving content to the trash. Move – move content items to a new section/category. Edit – update content. Copy – make a copy of content items. This can then be updated separately. New – make a new content item. Underneath the toolbar are 3 dropdown selection lists that let you select or filter the section/category/author of articles to display in the Article Manager.
Now take a look at the main section of the screen underneath the “Content Items Manager” title:
If you want to select all content items you can click on the checkbox next to the word “Title”. You can edit content items directly by clicking on the title of the content item otherwise click on the checkbox next to the title and click on the “Edit” button in the toolbar. If you try to click in several content items and edit them all at the same time only the first one will get updated. Editing content items has many options and I’ll cover that later on. You can quickly publish and unpublish individual items by clicking on the and icons. You can promote an article to being displayed on the frontpage by clicking on the icon in the front page column. Within each section and category content items are ordered. The order numbers seem to be out of sequence and some of the reorder and icons seem to be missing. This is because content items are only ordered within their category. For categories where there is only one content item there is nothing to reorder. If you were to make a menu item that showed a category as a table (rather like the contents page for the online version of this manual) then the ordering would be important. The ID column is the actual ID of the content item in the database.
The next 3 columns are Section, Category and Author. You can click through on these to edit to the respective item. The data column shows the creation date of the content item.
How do I create or edit a content Item? From the Content Item Manager click on the “New” button in the toolbar or on the name of the specific content item you want to update:
Here is the Content Item Creation/Edit Screen:
It differs a little fro the New Content Item screen because, for example, the New item screen may not yet know what category the new content item is in. There is a huge amount of information on this page. I’ve turned on the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor in the Global Configuration. This gives us a nice way to update content without knowing any HTML. Sometimes its better to live without it (particularly when updating modules) but for now it is helpful. The article./content item has a title and a title alias. It must also belong to a section and a category. If it does not then Joomla won’t allow you to save the content item. If you scroll down the screen you will see that the content is divided into two sections, a compulsory “Intro Text” section and an optional “Main Text” section. (Ironically it is possible to show articles without the Intro text so if there is no main text nothing shows!) The reason for this is that you may want to show the intro text on one page and the whole article including the Main Text on another. On the right of the screen are five tabs: Publishing, Images, Parameters, Meta Info and Link to Menu. The Publishing Tab The publishing tab shows information shows several input boxes:
Front page. Check this if you want the content item to display on the site’s front page. Published. Check this if you want the item to display on the frontend straight away. Access level. Check “Public” if anyone can see the content item (once its published), Registered if only logged in users can view it and Special if all other users who have been promoted beyond “Registered” can access it. Change Creator. Select his to alter the author of the content. Ordering. Select this to alter the ordering of the content item within its category. Override created date, Start Publishing and Finish Publishing alter timing data on the content item. The start and finish dates can be used for timelimited content such as a competition or an announcement that should appear on your site whilst you are away. The Images Tab The images Tab is used to specify the images that will display in your content item:
Click on the subfolder selection lest about half way down the right hand side of the screen. This lets you select a directory to find images:
You can upload the images to the stories folder using then Media Manager, then use the in this tab. Click on the image name in the Gallery Image section then use the >> and << buttons to add and remove images to the “Content Images” panel. Here I’ve selected a few images:
Click on the “Up” and “Down” images to reorder them. To place the images in your content just place the string {mosimage} in your content. Just to show you what happens I’ll put some {mosimage} tags in my article and view it on the front end: Click on the “Preview” button in the toolbar:
Here it is in the frontend:
The images are displayed in the order they occur, so the first {mosimage} tag gets the first image etc. The {mosimage} tag is an example of a mambot in action. Mambots post process your content, altering it just before it is displayed. The Parameters Tab The Parameters Tab is used to control the way in which your content item is displayed:
The options are: Page Class Suffix – this is a text string that is added to the styles when this page is displayed. This allows a designer to style the page for each content item individually. I’m not certain this is working 1.0.12, Back button – a back button can be displayed at the end of the content item. The possibilities are “Use Global” i.e. the default value set in the Global Configuration, “Hide” and “Show”. Page Title – to hide or show the content item’s title. Intro Text – to display the Intro Text. Section Name – to display the section name for this content item. Section Name Linkable – to make the section name link to the section, so you can see all the categories in the section. These tend to give your site more versatility from the user’s point of view making it easier to see groped categories and content.
Category Name – to display the category name for this content item.
Section Name Linkable – to make the category name link to the section, so you can see all the categories in the section.
Item Rating – Select this to see an Item Rating box allowing users to rate your article:
You can only configure polls so that people can only vote once per day. Author names – Lists the names of the article’s author. Created Date and Time – Does what it says on the tin. Modified Date and Time – Also does what it says on the tin. PDF Icon – Displays a PDF icon which you can click on the front end to download a PFD version of the article. Print Icon – displays a print icon on the frontend. Click on this to get a printable version of the content item. Email icon – Displays an email icon on the front end. Click on this to get a popup form to email a link to the content item to a friend. Key Reference – is a text string that can be used to refer to the article from a URL.
Docbook Type – experimental and should not have made the production code. The Meta Info Tab
This adds data to the meta tags for your site when the article is displayed. The “Add Sect/Cat/Title” button adds the section and category names to the keywords metatags. The Link To Menu Tab This is an easy way to add a content item to an existing menu:
Select a Menu, add the menu title and click on the “Link to Menu” button:
There is no simple remove from menu option but if you click on the menu name in the “Existing Menu Links” section you get to the Menu Manager screen for that menu. You can then trash or unpublish the menu item.
How do I view content in a particular section?
Click on the “Content” menu item then click through to the category you want then the top content items menu:
You can filter this screen by category or author or put in a search term in the filter box on the top right of the screen. Here I’ll look for content items with the word “Control” in the title:
You can hit tab once you’ve entered the search term in the filter box to run the search.
How do I manage content items on my site’s front page? Click on “Content” > “Front Page Manager”:
This gives you a view of the content items that just includes items marked to be displayed on your site’s front page. Just like the Content Item Manager you can reorder, publish, unpublish filter (i.e. search for) and archive items from this screen. Oddly enough you can’t take the content items off the front page here! Though you can edit or click through the content item’s name to get to the “Content Item Edit” screen. You and then take the article off the front page using the “Show on Front Page” checkbox under the “Publishing” tab:
How do I download and install a new extension? The process is pretty much the same whether you install a component, module or mambot. Let’s look at doing some social networking. Most Joomla extensions are available from http://extensions.joomla.org so let’s start off there and search for “social networking”:
Scroll down a bit and I find a likely looking extension SocialBookmarkerBot:
Click on the download link and save to your local drive. Now go to your site’s Control Panel and click on the Installers menu. Social Bookmarker Bot looks like a mambot (digging round on the author’s website confirms this as does the plugin icon) so click on the Mambots menu item:
This takes us through to the Mambot Installation Screen:
Note the warning about thirdparty software. Look at the install from directory section. There are 6 warnings. I need to o and alter some directory permissions on my site. Once I’ve done this I can hit the reload button to check that everything is okay.
That’s better. The red warnings have turned green. Now I can enter the location of the mambot zip file that I downloaded in the Upload Package File input and click on the “Upload & Install” button.
Good – we got a success message. So click on the Continue link:
We get taken back to the Mambot Installation page. Unfortunately our new mambot won’t work just yet. We need to configure and publish it first. So click on “Mambots” > “Site Mambots”:
Click through on the “Social Bookmarker Mambot” link:
Takes you through to the mambot configuration screen.
I’ll set the mambot’s state to “published” and do some basic configuration of the options on the right of the screen, then click on the Save or Apply buttons in the toolbar, and we’re nearly complete. If our pages are being cached then the new mambot’s output won’t show up until the cache expires so let’s clear down the caches. Click on “System” > “Clear Content Cache”:
If you don’t have these options it is because you don’t have caching enabled (It lives in your site’s Global Configuration under the cache tab). Now let’s look at the front end to see if its worked:
What is in a template? A Joomla Template is a set of files that compose the “skin” of your site. You can download templates from many sources, commercial and noncommercial on the internet. Let’s take a look at one. Clicking on the downloaded template zip file gives:
There are two folders. The css folder contains the stylesheet(s) for the template. The images folder contains the images that the template requires. The template_thumbnail is an image showing what the template looks like. It is used in the Template Manager, you can run your mouse over the available templates to see popup thumbnail images of the templates in action. The index.php file is the main template file. It mostly contains HTML code but there is quite a bit of PHP in there too. The PHP is telling Joomla where to put your site’s content, modules, metatags etc. There is another phpfile, templates.php probably called by index.php. Finally there is a file called templateDetails.xml that contains a definition of the template in XML. It contains things like the templates version and author details, a list of all of the files in the template etc.
Security In the past Joomla has been plagued with security problems. These are not necessarily the fault of the Mambo/Joomla developers. They are really an unfortunate mix of configuration options that can be worked around by developers. Joomla sites have often been the victims of phishers where bad guys have taken over the site and used it for phishing attacks (for example putting up a site that looks like a bank’s site and inducing people pass over their security information by trying to log in). This often happens without the knowledge of the site’s owner. Recently however the intrinsic security of Joomla has been improved, however this is not the whole story. The most common attack happens because of a design problem in PHP that allows PHP, when configured in a particular way, to open remote web pages as if they were files on the server. When this is coupled with a simple programmer mistake disaster can occur. … When you need this PHP feature it is incredibly useful, however under certain circumstances it can allow an attacker to run their code on your machine.
… When they can do that they can take over your site, and perhaps other sites on your server. …When they can do that they can try to gain “root” access which would allow them to completely take over your server. (“root” is the equivalent user in unix/linux to the super administrator in Joomla. It is essentially all powerful.) Another PHP configuration problem allows variables that you can set from your web browser to become PHP variables on your server. This can be disastrous. Unless you control your own server you may not be able to control the PHP configuration setup. (The PHP configuration is stored in a file called php.ini which normally lives away from your Joomla files. On a shared server you will not have the required privileges to update this file.) Joomla tries to get around these problems. Pay careful attention to the recommendations that the Joomla installation process makes. The Joomla Installation recommends that you update the globals.php file. Change the line that says: define(‘RG_EMULATION’,1); To say: define(‘RG_EMULATION,0); Joomla distributions should pass security checks before being released, however many Joomla security problems have originated in third party components. Every PHP file in Joomla (apart from the index.php files at the top level and administrator level) should have a line at the top of it that prevents it from being run directly. In Joomla 1.0 this line looks like this: defined(‘_VALID_MOS’) or die (‘Restricted Access’);
In Joomla 1.5 it looks like this: defined(‘_JEXEC’) or die(‘Restricted Access’); These lines greatly reduce the security problems associated with Joomla. You should audit any added components, modules, mambots or templates that you install on your site to make sure that every .php file has one of these lines to stop it from being run directly. The directories/folders you need to consider are: components modules mambots templates administrator/components administrator/templates administrator/modules Check all of the .php files that you install into these directories, or preferably unzip anything you install and audit before you install it. Each directory/folder in your Joomla installation has a file called index.php. In most cases this just returns an empty web page. It exists to prevent your web server from returning a list of files in the folder under certain server configurations. It is a rather cool idea to overwrite the index.php files that return blank pages with ones that return a view of your site redirecting the user back to your home page. Make sure you back up anything you overwrite first.
Backups It goes without saying that your data is very valuable and the work you put into your site is valuable. If you don’t back up your site and you database regularly you risk losing everything. Don’t rely on backups to the same disk that your Joomla installation or database files live on. If possible copy your data to your PC or ideally onto a USB drive. Keep 2 copies of the backups on different machines. Don’t rely on mirroring or RAID5. These may help you if you lose an individual disk but won’t help you f files are accidentally deleted. Make sure you back up to a different machine, Use a backup service if necessary. Make sure that you know how to restore your site from the backups. If your site is being hosted by 7th Sin Digital you will have a control panel which has a backup option. It will have a link to a database control center, which will usually have a copy of phpmyadmin running behind it. You can use this to download copies of your database.