CMS/JOOMLA TUTORIALS

jayesser posted this at 12:30 — 20th August 2009.

Joined: Aug 2009

Here I am making another post about CMS.

I develop websites for clients and now need to offer CMS as its a headache implementing peoples changes every time. I cant find the time and they need to do it themselves now. But a lot of the sites ive used Dreamwevaer to develop. My clients cant use Dreamweaver.

Im ok with Wordpress but i need to get my head around Joomla. Ive looked at tutorials and still cant quite grasp it. Can anyone suggest any easy to follow online tutorials on Joomla or CMS in general?

Greg K posted this at 13:45 — 20th August 2009.

He has: 2,145 posts

Joined: Nov 2003

I second this, I would love to see a nice simple tutorial to show how to set up a basic CMS (any would do), where I go in, put in the basic structure and template and then turn it over to the client, pretty much locked down where they can just edit content, add pages, and EASILY add it to the multiple naviagtions (Primary, main, footer) and easily add images to display on that page.

I've tried it in Drupal, was a lot of steps and I may have been doing it wrong, but I either had to give them too much access to alter navigations, or too limited (they could only add/edit, but not place in navigation except in one section). Plus with Drupal, IMO, it is a pain that all admin navigation is there for them to accidentally place their page under.

-Greg

greg posted this at 23:02 — 20th August 2009.

He has: 1,581 posts

Joined: Nov 2005

Greg K wrote:

I would love to see a nice simple tutorial to show how to set up a basic CMS (any would do), where I go in, put in the basic structure and template and then turn it over to the client

This can be achieved with Wordpress, and I would imagine most CMS'.
There are many theme templates to download for Wordpress, so as long as your client knows you're doing that and it's not being designed by you, then it should be fine.
Make sure you choose a theme that is validated - this is not essential but many have loads of W3C errors, and it's usually these that have display and code errors too (as a general rule of thumb).
And make sure the page navigation, category navigation etc are dynamic, so you can use the CMS dashboard to add, delete or edit the navigation items and the site will adjust to accept them.

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Basic description of Wordpress

Wordpress uses the theme files to display all the content you make in the dashboard. So editing the theme files is all you need to do to change the design and layout of a WP site/blog.

There is a learning curve to how Wordpress uses the theme files and how it offers the CMS content (in defined functions) in each file.

But you simply use the provided functions WP generates in the core code (which you don't need to ever touch) to insert content around your HTML and CSS.

If viewing a "page" it uses "page.php" (the page.php file in the theme folder), then there's category.php to show categories, single.php for showing a single article on its own, etc.
comments.php handles the comment listing and styling, and this file is simply a function to include the comments.php file within another file, commonly in the single.php, as viewing a single article tends to show the comments underneath it (it's much like a PHP include).
But as with all functions can be used in most places. So the comments function can be used in the index if desired.

In each file is the basic Wordpress loop. This is basically "if there is some content, loop and show it otherwise sorry nothing found", whether looping all articles from a certain category, all articles from all categories (usually the homepage - index.php) or a single article.

So when you click on an article title, Wordpress will use "single.php" to show that article. So whatever styling you have in "single.php" file will be used when viewing a single article.
Whatever styling you have in "category.php" file will be used to list all articles in that given category.

So within the loop on say "category.php" it will be showing (looping) all your articles from the category the user selected.
You could have a main wrapper DIV in the loop with a black border and in that div put all the functions that show the content for each article - the title, author, date, text, rss feed etc.
Once that article is displayed, the loop will then just show the next article in that category in the same fashion - DIV with black border etc.
And (eg) a 40px top margin on the black bordered div will make a space between each article listed on the page.

There is a template hierarchy where Wordpress uses a list of files in the template for certain areas. For example, viewing all from a certain category tends to be referred to as "archive" which can be a bit confusing.
But the order of theme files it will use for category listing is category.php first, then if not found archive.php, then others (if all are there it just uses the first in the defined hierarchy and ignores the others even exist).

Then the dashboard is simply used to edit categories, articles, posts, pages, comments etc and it is all just automatically styled and displayed as per your theme file code.

This is of course a tiny list of how it works, and I understand to most people even this break down is probably been a bit confusing. But this is the basics of Wordpress and once you get to know this structure, making themes is very similar to just making a website design and layout.

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The best way is to view the files in the default theme "/content/wp-themes/default" and see how the functions are used.
Most are named pretty logically so are understandable at first glance.
Then you can see how you would put some HTML and CSS around those functions.
Just as you would a website, only the content in DIVs/Tables etc is just inserted using the relevant WP function.

There are other things needed to learn as with most things, for example certain functions either need to be within the Wordpress loop or not (some both), and although it is a learning curve, if you already make websites, especially if you use PHP, it doesn't take long to get to grips with it.
But all the functions are described and outlined in the Wordpress codes. Searching the function name in Google usually takes you to the relevant codex page.

It's not for everyone though, which is why I get paid to make WP themes