Prof3ta

Finally, here we are with a new review on a Joomla! book. This is time for: Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5, edited by Packt Publishing. 

I'd like to start this review with a note: this book is not intended for developers, but for the final average users. I wanted to highlight this since - just to be honest - I found this work a bit trivial. But I guess this is essentially due to the fact I spent at least a couple of years working on Joomla! and developing extensions for this amazing CMS, while this book is simply aimed at explaining how to manage and maintain a Joomla! website. I was probably not the best person to review the book. For sure, I was not part of the intended audience for it.

Apart from this note, I need to say the book is very well organized and it presents a number of possible configurations and optimizations for a Joomla! website. A very large attention is dedicated to the Administration Application, presenting all the features available within the CMS with a really high level of detail.

After a brief introduction on terminology and concepts that need to be known by a final user, the book covers the installation procedure for the CMS, giving an easy answer to the most common questions that a basic user could have while installing Joomla! for the first time. Then, management of modules, components and plugins is faced, with a good number of practical examples. Languages and colors management are presented as well.

I loved the accuracy the author used to introduce the Administration panel, covered in a seriously detailed way. Template creation is presented in Chapter 13, but I've got the feeling is that the content for this section is too much for a basic user and too less for an advanced one. I noticed Packt Publishing released a specific book on template creation and design and, even if I still hadn't look at it, I guess that's a nice solution to learn more about Joomla! templates.

Chapter 12 revealed a nice surprise, covering some of the most common extensions available on the web for the Joomla! CMS: forums, document managers, photo-galleries. Appendix F needs to be mentioned, too, since it's covering one of the most troubling procedures in maintaining a Joomla! website: migrating from version 1.0 to 1.5 of the framework.

My final opinion on the book is that it could be useful for a very basic user, someone that has 0% knowledge about programming and just decided to use Joomla! for a new website. All advanced users should simply skip this book, focusing on others book available from Packt Publishing.