Now that we have Joomla!
installed let's take a look at the back-end of Joomla!
or the administrator side of Joomla!.
We will need to login to see that and we will take a look at the interface and a
little bit about the menus that are located in a back-end of Joomla!.
So I am going to go to localhost/administrator.
And if you're on a Mac you are going to go to localhost:8888/administrator.
And if we go there you will see that we come to a login screen and we are going
to login with the username and password that we established as part of
installation and that was admin as our username and admin as our password and
go ahead and log in.
And this is Joomla!'s Control Panel this is where you'll land once you log into
the back-end of Joomla!.
And for those of you who have worked with Joomla!
before you'll notice that this is radically different than what you used to
see when you log into Joomla!.
So on the right side of the screen we have a series of shortcuts, these are
little icons that will take you to some of the most commonly used areas inside
of Joomla!, including making articles, the article manager, the media manager at
various configuration screens.
On the left side of the screen you'll see that we have a number of system issues
here where we can configure things in Global Configuration, clear out the cache;
install new extensions for the Web site.
All of this stuff we are going to be covering over the course of the next many, many videos.
So let's take a look at the menus that go across the top of the page.
So first of all if you click on the icon up here in the upper left-hand corner,
this will open the front-end of the Web site in a new tab, so you can see the way
your Web site is looking.
Here in the back-end of Joomla!
once again there are series of menus here with drop-downs and various pieces of
information on each of these menus.
The System menu is where you can go to come back to the Control Panel which is
the screen that we are on right now.
You can also configure things in the Global Configuration including the meta
keywords in the meta description for the entire Web site.
You can set up some text filtering for putting articles into the Web site, you
can set up information concerning the database;
there is a number of things that go on in Global Configuration.
Global Check-in is a way you can check items into the Web site that might have
been checked out that were failed to have been checked in.
I'll go through that in a little bit more detail in a future video.
We can clear the cache for the Joomla!
Web site or purchase expired cache and one of the important screens that's here
that you may windup using frequently is the System Information.
If you click that link this will give you all of the critical information about
the system that's currently running your Joomla! Web site.
So notably it's going to tell you things like your database version and your PHP version.
So these are things that are very important that you're going to need to know.
It'll also tell you what version of Joomla!
you're running because on the front-end of the Web site by default you don't see
the version of Joomla!
that you're running anymore.
That is something that we can turn on and I will show you how to do that in
a future video, but if that feature is not turned on inside the back-end of Joomla!
you're going to have to come to this screen to find out what version of Joomla! you are running.
So that is what the System Information is here for.
So I am going to go back to the Control Panel by selecting Control Panel under
System, so I am back to this screen.
The Users menu item will give you lots of things you can look at for users
including creating new users, assigning them password as well as all of the
commands that you are going to need to configure ACL for the Web site.
ACL is Access Control Lists and this is controlling who sees what and who can do
what on the Web site.
Mass Mail Users is an option that's here inside of Joomla!, it's kind of old,
I really actually wish they'd take it out of Joomla! altogether.
But the idea here is that you can send an e-mail only formatted in text format
to people who are registered for the Joomla! Web site.
The downside to this is, first of all it's only a text e-mail, you can't do any
HTML formatting or anything exciting like that.
And the other thing is of course that e-mail is coming from your Web server
which may potentially mean that your Web server winds up getting blacklisted as
a spam server that's sending a lot of spam.
You're far better off using a true e-mail newsletter type of service, if that is
the kind of thing that you want to do.
Use something like Constant Contact or VerticalResponse or MailChimp or any one
of a number of other services that are out there.
They are designed to make sure that your e-mails are delivered, that you don't
get blacklisted for spam, that they make it past all of the filters on AOL and
Comcast and Gmail and all the rest of them.
I would recommend just staying away from the Mass Mail Users functionality in
Joomla!, there's too many downsides to it.
The Menus item is where you go to make new menus for your Web site as well as add
items to existing menus.
So right now we have a menu in the front of the Web site, it only has a home link
on it, but this is where we go to add additional menu items.
The Content menu is someplace we will spend a lot of time, this is where we add
new pieces of content to the Web site including articles as well as we can manage
our images in the Media Manager.
Components are big functionalities that we add to Joomla!, they take up the
entire screen when they display.
So things like the Contact forms for the Web site are an example of that.
This also contains some Administrator side components as well that will be
useful to you like updating to the next version of Joomla! via the Joomla!
update link or the redirect link which is a great piece of functionality that
will allow you to direct old Web addresses to currently existing pages,
it's very, very helpful functionality when you upgrade the Web site or your redesign
the Web site from a static site or previous version of Joomla!.
Under Extensions this is where we can manage some additional pieces of
functionality, I will cover the Language Manager in the chapter on multilingual
Web sites so your Joomla! site
can be presented in more than one language.
We'll be working with ours in English and Italian.
There's a Template Manager which changes the look of the Web site as well as
modules and plug-ins which are two additional kinds of extensions and I'll walk
you through all of that in other chapters.
The Extension Manager is where you go to install extensions or
uninstall extensions.
Finally the Help menu contains lots of great resources for getting
additional help with Joomla!.
You can go to the Official Support Forum which is at forum.joomla.org which is
where you can go and ask many questions about Joomla! and how it works.
There's a documentation wiki where you can read about Joomla!
and get additional help.
And there are these additional links to other on property resources at
joomla.org including the Joomla!
Extensions directory which I'll cover in a future video.
The place of Joomla Translations where you can go to download additional Joomla!
translations so that Joomla!
can run in a language other than English.
The Joomla Resources directory where you can get recommendations for Web hosting
or other firms and freelancers who can help you with Joomla!
Web site development and training.
The Community Portal which is a centralized location where you can learn about
the latest what's going on with Joomla!.
The Security Center where you get updates about what's happening with Joomla!
from a security perspective.
What you need to watch out for, for security holes, how you can improve the
security of your Joomla! site.
The Developer Resources location where you can find out about Joomla!'s roadmap
and get involved with developing Joomla!
and the Joomla Shop which is where you can go to buy T-shirts and hats and all
kinds of other fun Joomla! paraphernalia.
Over here on the very far right of the screen is a link for Super User.
Here is where you can go to edit your account so you can change your username or
your password or put in additional information about yourself and you can also
log out of the Web site with this link.
Down at the very bottom of the screen there is another link to view the Web site
and if I click this it does exactly the same thing as clicking the KinetECO link
up here in the upper right-hand corner.
This will also tell us who's logged into the site in terms of visitors
and administrators.
The little mail icon indicates anybody who might have sent you an e-mail within the Joomla! system.
Again that's a feature that I don't generally use, don't recommend using.
And then finally logging out of the Web site.
So if you click on the Logout link, you of course will logout of the back-end of Joomla!.
So that is a very quick tour through what's available in Joomla!
what's available for interfaces, what's available for menu items and in all of
the next many videos I will be going through exactly what all those menu items
are and how they work.