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.

My name's Andrea, and I've been designing websites for just about nine years, starting way back in the day of Geocities and Angelfire. About a month ago, I was introduced to Joomla. When I first heard of Joomla, a former client was telling me about how amazing it was. He didn't know what it was exactly, but he knew it was amazing. When I looked it up myself, I have to admit I was completely lost, and at first, totally uninterested. I already had my way of designing websites and it worked. Yeah, I used tables for my layouts, and the biggest site map I could boast had about fifteen pages, but Joomla looked like a complicated program that would take months to learn.

Last week the San Luis Obispo Chamber of Commerce won second place in an annual contest that judges Chamber of Commerce websites. WACE, the Western Association of Chamber Executives, ranked the SLO Chamber based on the interconnectivity of three websites, Slochamber.org, Visitslo.com, and Slo-business.com. Things brings great pride to our hearts, not only because our local chamber is winning awards, but of course because we built Slo-business.com!

While browsing around Joomla.org the other day, I came across one of the most interesting blog posts I have seen lately. In this post, the author Ankit Ahuja speaks about his Summer of Code project in which he fine-tunes a feature that will have both Joomla! developers and clients alike scrambling for the Extensions Directory when it comes out. Front-end editing has finally arrived for the Joomla! CMS.