Joomla - no idea where to start with functionality!

Dave!

Hi guys,

Was hoping for a bit of help here. I've never worked with Joomla
before, but have been tasked with building a Joomla website for a
client. The company doesn't normally do websites, so nobody here has
any Joomla experience either... I'm not really sure where to start to
be honest!

I'm not familiar with the architecture of Joomla, so I'm starting from
scratch really. I know PHP/MySQL, and have developed and customised on
another (proprietary) CMS in the past, so that's the extent of it.
Anyway, I'll just spell out some of the functionality I've got to add,
and maybe you guys can point me in the right direction to get started?
It's nothing hugely complex, but I just don't know if I should be
building a module/component, modifying a template, creating one from
scratch, or just hard-coding things into articles/pages.

1 - Several static pages, e.g. About Us, Contact Us...
Should be straight-forward once I get to know the CMS.

2 - Couple of pages with animated sliders/faders.
I'll be looking to add a couple of sliders with jQuery, but they'll
have to be editable through the CMS by the client. They'll also
probably need to link to certain pages.
The problems I'm thinking about are:
a. I'll have to be able to upload the image files through the CMS, and
keep them grouped separately for the separate sliders
b. Where can I add the links so that the images go to certain pages?
c. Typically jQuery sliders expect you to present the HTML in a
certain format, which they then animate. How can I get the images
pulled from the database and displayed in e.g. the following format:
<ul class="animate-me">
<li><a href="#"><img src="#" /></a></li>
<li><a href="#"><img src="#" /></a></li>
<li><a href="#"><img src="#" /></a></li>
</ul>


3 - Recipes database
There will be some sort of recipes database, which will allow the
client to upload ingredients, methods, and an image to it. Then it'll
be displayed on the front end of the site in some way, I think the
client want wants some sort of modal popup, Lightbox will probably do
it. There isn't much of a spec for this, so I'll have to come back to
it.

I'd appreciate any direction or suggestions on any or all aspects of
this! I'm at a bit of a loss, and want to make sure I'm heading in the
right direction. Is there a standard way of dealing with the jQuery
sliders for example? I suspect that there is. Are there extensions for
all of these issues?
Thanks alot
Dave

moycullen14

Hi,

Joomla is great. I'd be a big fan. However the installation process is a bit daunting. I've only ever used it on mac/linux but the key is to get the installation right.

Before you start, make sure you have a working web server (apache is best), php & mysql installation. LAMP is a good place to start. I believe you can get joomla to work with other webservers & databases (php is fixed) but LAMP is probably the easiest to get working.

Once you download the joomla zip file and expand it in your web servers document area, off you go.

Joomla has concepts of articles (content really), menus, modules (separate code areas) and templates (independent layout, look & feel). Using the administrator section of the web site you can change these to your hearts content. There are a lot of templates & modules out there which are easy to use and will save a lot of time. One template I used recently had a fe implementation for the iphone so I got a mobile-enabled web site for free!

Although principally a CRM, I find it most useful for configuration, layout and browser independence.

Dave!

err... Okay

I had no trouble with installation, but I had some specific questions above, so maybe you can help with them.

adm

There are a number of modules/ components available for slideshows so you wont have to create a new one for that or anything else.

The only possibly tricky bit could be the recipes. If its just a series of recipes (one per page say) then thats easy. If its actually going to be a kind of seachable database of recipes that is more complex. One suggestion would be to use virtuemart which is a popular eccommerce component for joomla. you can just turn off the eccomerce aspect of it and use it as a brochure. That might suit your needs.

I've built a number of joomla and wordpress sites and people without much dev knowledge always say wordpress is more user friendly and you can achieve the same results so it may be worth considering.

p.s. when starting joomla people have difficulty understanding why it just doesnt have 'pages' that you can add.
Basically menu item linking to article = a page (effectively)
Seems strange at first but has its advantages.