Using Joomla

I thought I would start a thread so Harrison could answer all my questions and anyone else starting out using Joomla could also benefit :)

So...I've followed the quickstart guide and have created a basic site. I'm finding that if I step slightly outside the boundaries, I'm lost and the online help doesn't seem to.

I have two menu's in the Menu Manager page, 'Main Menu' and 'Articles'. Both have published articles in them. On my homepage I only get 'Main Menu' appearing. I am expecting to see 'Articles' underneath it, but it's not. The online help doesn't tell me how to get it to appear! It's of status 'published', and the menu items are all published (if I move them back to 'Main menu' they appear in it). I can't find anywhere where I can add the 'Articles' menu to the homepage (or any other). How do I get additional menu's to appear?
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It would seem I have to add a new module of type 'Menu'.

You got it. For each separate menu you need to add a new menu module. That way you can control where each of the menus appears on the page, and which pages of the site it shows on.

What do you think of Joomla so far? It can seem quite complex at the very beginning, but it is quite powerful and removes the need for any hand coding.

I only played with it last night for about 2 hours and I find it counter-intuitive. The homepage is the most important page of the site, and I found I can't construct it as a traditional page, I have to 'construct' it by going into various different Sections, Categories and Articles and saying which bits I want on the front page, each from their own page.

I can see how powerful it is, and how much work it does for you, but you have to build it all from the bottom-up instead of top-down, so getting to the stage where you have a basic mock-up of how you want the front page to be means you have to add in enough Articles, Menu's, Sections, Categories etc that it takes so much longer to visualise.

After I've migrated all the content I'm also going to have to work out how to change the template to get e.g. the company logo/banner across the top. It's quite daunting when you start because although the Quick Start guide shows you how it works, as soon as you want to e.g. add a new menu, there's just no help and it's not intuitive enough to try and work it out. I only managed to get my second menu to display by clicking around all the Admin tool and systematically going through every single option to try and find anything that might do it.

As I said, Joomla can seem very complex and confusing when first using it. But once you get the way it works then it all quickly falls into place. Like any CMS, it works on building blocks, with the template you are using having placeholders for module positions, and components can be added to add whole new section types to the software.

As you probably have worked out, any article can be sent to the frontpage by selecting to show it in the frontpage via a tick box in each article's properties. This is a very powerful feature as you can pull content from anywhere on the site into the frontpage, and remove it again so it is back in just its own section. Great for posting news and other updates on the frontpage.

Regarding customising the template. That is specific to each template as they can be coded however the designer wished. In a Joomla template you can design the layout however you wish, and insert some php code within the template that tells Joomla where the module positions are, where the main body area is etc... Other than that, you can make a template however you wish. Great for customisation.

You might like to consider trying one of the free templates from Rocket Themes as they include lots of great information with the templates on how to quickly change the logos, and also come with multiple looks for each module position to make a site look more diverse.

Thanks for the advice on the templates, I have a couple to work from.

You mentioned in this thread that I can install it to a subfolder off the domain root. What I want to do is install it for the moment to a subfolder (so that it doesn't affect the existing site), and then when it is ready just move it to the root. Is this possible? This will allow me to work on setting it up wherever I am, not just when I'm sat at home using a local install.
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Ah, it seems yes, this is possible. Sorted!

The Joomla community forums definitely contain a load of useful information to answer most questions. It is how I mainly got to grips with Joomla a few years ago. They are fairly quick to answer questions on there too.

Most of the popular component developers are also more than happy to answer questions sent to them in personal emails, or on their own site forums. All in all Joomla has one of the best communities I've seen for anything web related (vBulletin is the other community I've always impressed by).