This is part 3 of my series on learning Joomla. Here we're going to focus on getting aquainted with the basic features, layout, and structure of Joomla. If you've already installed Joomla, you're ready to go.

The Basic Features of Joomla

When making the most basic site, Joomla uses components, menus, modules, and templates. Components make up the site itself and include the content of the site, banners, polls, search bars, news feeds, and more. Menus are built in order to navigate the site (surprise, surprise). Modules are like widgets, and hold components, menus, or custom html and let you control where they show up on the page. Templates control the way your site looks, and are made up of css and php files. If Joomla was a tray at an all-you-can-eat buffet, components would be the food, menus would be the utensils, modules would be the cups and plates, and templates would be the garnishes. Ya, this probably isn't the best illustration, but I think you get the gist.

Navigating the Back End

To reach Joomla's back end, where you're going to do almost all your work, enter "/administrator" after your site's url and you'll be at a login page. Your username will be admin, your password will be the one you made during installation. After logging in you'll be directed to the control panel.

Looking at the control panel, you can see the basic layout of Joomla.

We have a menu at the top and we have an array of nifty shortcut buttons. We also have an expandable menu on the right. Is this important? Not at this point. But give it a look just the same.

The menu is composed of seven drop down buttons.

• In Site, control aspects that effect your whole site. Assign and manage users, add images or video in the Media Manager, and set Global Configurations (Parameters).
• In Menus, use Menu Manager to see all the menus on your site and edit them or add more or view and edit each menu seperately in its own Manager.
• Content- Pretty self explanatory. We'll go into the organization of content in Joomla sites soon.
• In Components, control the different features of your site other than content. This menu includes any extra components you upload to Joomla after installation.
• In Extensions, you can install modules, plugins, and components, view and manage these extras you've installed, manage templates that control the look and feel of your site, and manage languages.
• In Tools you can use the messaging feature of Joomla, check in articles (if you use the back button on your browser, the page you were editing will remain checked out, making it unavailable to other users. Use this tool to check them all in at once), and clean the cache.
• Help- I think you get what this does.

I encourage you to poke around and get to know Joomla. The more familiar you are with the structure, the easier it will be to manage your site.

What's This About Sections, Categories, and Articles?

The content in Joomla is organized into sections, which contain categories, which contain articles. It might sound complicated, but it's really not. A section is like a filing cabinet, a category is the folder, and articles are the files. Knowing the difference between sections, categories, and articles and how to organize your content into these is important to master. But luckily, this is the easiest to learn through experience. It also helps to build a site map before you start fleshing out the site in Joomla.

Now that we've done all the homework, and have really gotten to know Joomla inside and out, I think it's time to start our first website. Part 4 of this series will teach you how to transition from traditional site building to Joomla site building and I'll also share some tips and shortcuts that will get your first site up and running in no time.