Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website

The author Barrie North, a partner of JoomlaShack.com, has written a book that teaches by showing you start-to-finish case studies of building several Joomla-powered sites such as a school site (chapter 10), a restaurant site (chapter 11), a blog site (chapter 12), and more. You can preview these demo sites linked here.

In addition, Appendix B shows six case studies of real organizations that uses Joomla.

This book does not assume any prior experience with Joomla as it covers installation (chapter 2), administration basics (chapter 3), and creating menus (chapter 5). For the more advanced, it covers extending Joomla with third-party components (chapter 6) and creating a Joomla template (chapter 9). Very useful is chapter 8 and appendix C which explains how to get traffic and search engine optimization.

Joomla! Cash: Money-making weapons for your Joomla! website

If you are considering building a content website with the hopes of monetizing it with Pay-Per-Click ads or banner ads, then you will need a content management system like Joomla that will enable you to publish lots of content quickly without needing to hard-code your content into the HTML of your webpages.

However, as the authors Brandon Dawson and Tom Canavan pointed out in the beginning pages of the book, the idea of "If you build it, they will come" is a myth. You need to do more than just pump out content. Hence, the book provides a brief overview of search engine optimization in terms of Joomla's built in SEO functionality in the "Search Engine Friendly URs" option as well as the OpenSEF component which includes a sitemap feature. Next, you will want to analyze your visitors pattern by using JoomlaStats or Google Analytics.

The book gives a basic tour of the concepts of banner ads, pay-per-click ads such as Google AdSense, affiliate programs such as Amazon, branded merchandise such as CafePress, donation jars, and subscription-based access. If you are thinking of an eCommerce site selling your own products, the book introduces you to VirtueMart, which is an eCommerce extension designed to work well with Joomla.

This book is 165 pages. So it is a quick read to provide you with a big picture overview of website monetization. Once you know which concepts are better suited for your particular site, you will then be able to find more in-depth books relating to that topic.

Disclosure: Author of this review has received complimentary copy of book from publisher.

Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5

This books is written for content editors, developers, and other users of a Joomla powered website. You do not need any prior programming experience as this book starts from the beginning with chapter one explaining what a content management system is and its associated terms and jargon. Chapter two will explain how to install Joomla in a local environment as well as in a web host environment. Once Joomla is installed with sample data, the next chapter will give you a tour by explaining with pictures the various sections of the Joomla site.

Instead of searching through the web documentations and forums, this book will provide an easy to find reference as well as a more structured approach to learning Joomla. The book devotes a chapter to each section of the menu system in Joomla's administrative control panel. For example ...

• chapter 6 for the "Site" menu
• chapter 7 for the "Menus" menu
• chapter 8 for the "Content" menu
• chapter 9 for the "Components" menu
• chapter 10 for the "Extensions" menu
• chapter 11 for the "Tools" menu

However, if you don't want to get into the nitty-gritty details of each any every one of the menu items of the admin control panel, it is perfectly find to skip directly to chapter 16 where the author Hagen Graf goes through the process of taking a website idea and bring it to realization in a Joomla site.

The nice thing about Joomla is that it can be extended in functionality by plugins. Chapter 12 talks about Fireboard (a forum plugin), DOCman for document management, and Expose Flash photo gallery plugin.

Although not necessary for those who just want to use Joomla to add content; but for those who want to, you can learn to write your own templates (chapter 13) and components (chapter 15). There is also chapter 14 on website accessibility contributed by Angi Radtke.

You may also want to take a look at other reviews of this book at slashdot.org and theopensourcery.com.

Disclosure: Author of this review has received complimentary copy of book from publisher.