Joomla! Content Management System (CMS) Ebook Joomla EBook is presented to
you by Kanga Internet. | Lets Take a look at your frontpageNow that your Joomla system has been installed and setup by web design company, Kanga, lets take
a look at your homepage and carefully explore it; we can take a look at the result together. At first glance, these pages look a bit confusing.
In principle, they are divided into a front end and a back end. Customers and web surfers see the front end; the back end is only accessible by
coworkers or administrators.
Joomla Front End After spending some time on the
homepage, you will realize that many different functions are integrated into the page. In order to get a better overview, I have marked and
labeled the different areas of the page, illustrated in
Figure 3.1: |  | Figure 3.1:
Structure of the Sample Website
The art of web design now
consists of recognizing the elements that are important for your homepage, omitting the unimportant ones, and presenting them to the user in a
logical, easy-to-understand, and attractive format. The result is always a compromise between functionality and organization. From the
configuration, this structure reminds one of a daily newspaper or a portal like Yahoo! or Freenet. On the left and right there are boxes
with clearly defined contents. In the centre are announcements. A joomla template determines the layout
of the page. Templates are exchangeable and modifiable, meaning that the same content can be displayed in different layouts. Every daily
newspaper would envy you for this functionality. Let's go over the example layout a bit more
closely. | | | There are five different categories of areas on the page:
• Menus
• Content
• Advertising
• Functions
• Decorative Elements Menus
Menus are there to make navigation on the page as easy as possible for the user. There are different menus for different tasks. Joomla!
has four kinds of menus in the example data. You can add as many additional menus as you want. The fourth menu, by the way, is not shown in our
example. The registered user sees the user menu after he or she has logged on.
Top Menu
The top
menu is as high up on the page as possible. It gives the user quick access to the most important content of the page. Such a menu often
displays products, contacts, and company information: |  | Figure 3.2: Top Menu
Main Menu
The main menu is the central navigation area of the page. There should always be a link to return to the
first page. This menu should appear in exactly the same position on every page of the website. The main menu is an important orientation place
for the user: |  | Figure 3.3: Main Menu
Other Menu
An
additional menu, the other menu can pop up in all kinds of places (module positions, refer Chapter 4 for more information). Depending on the
content and context of the page it can make sense to offer additional menu options: |  | | Figure
3.4: Other Menu |
|
Joomla - Front End