Joomla CMS, Adding Content

Joomla has a huge following, and there are many resource for information.  I've read Barrie M. Norths "Joomla! A User's Guide" and I highly recomend it for an administrators guide to administration and a designers guide to skinning.  There is always the web site documentation, and if there are bugs, or things not covered in the documentation, search the joomla forums, and if that fails, submit a question on the forums.

Below is a birds eye view of how simple Joomla's CMS works.  Below is the administration console on a fairly standard installation.  From the console you can administer the site with tasks like administer users, groups, content, and loaded and configured extensions.

For adding content, joomla uses the open source project tinyMCE in a standard distribution.  On this installation the JCE editor has been installed.  It is built on tinyMCE, so the look is very similar.  The buttons you see above the text are configurable, and more buttons appear depending on the JCE plug-ins installed.

As pages are added, you will have to reference them in links from other pages.  the JCE editor has a nice plug-in which allows you to choose from added pages as seen in the below image.

Adding images to content is really easy with the JCE editor as seen below.  If the image you want to upload is not on the server, you can upload it from the same interface as you use to place the image in the document.  Below is the dialog box for uploading images to the server, and placing them in the document.

Once the content is saved, and linked, it will be displayed on the web site.  Notice that once the web site is designed the content entered inherits all the style, so everything automatically looks correct.   Also notice, this example has a calendar displayed on the right, which is a configuration option which can be administered from the console above.

Finally since Joomla is build on the design patter MVC, Model View Controller, the content added can simultaneously appear in a RSS feed, be printed, or be seen on a mobile device like an iPhone.