Introduction and logging into Joomla
Hey YouTube, how's it going? It's Quinton here and welcome to my second Joomla video. In this video, we're actually going to take a quick look at the back end of Joomla. I'm going to explain basically what all the links are and where to find everything in Joomla. After that, we should be good to go and start creating a website. First thing you need to do is log into the back end of Joomla. In case you guys didn't know, you just go ahead to wherever you're hosting your site. Mine's localhost in a folder called Joomla 33, and you're going to type in administrator. That's going to take you through to the back end of your site. Of course, you're going to have to log in with whatever username and password you set up whenever you were setting Joomla up. Then you will go through to this page over here which is the Joomla control panel.
Control panel layout and menus
Whenever you log into Joomla it will take you through to the control panel. If we take a look at this control panel real quick, you can see we've got a menu along the top of the page and a menu along the side. This side menu is actually only here on the control panel. When we go to any other page within the back end of Joomla, this menu will disappear and we will use the menu at the top. Towards the right and the middle of the screen you can see we've got a bunch of messages over here. This is just some messages about post installation of Joomla. We also have some logged-in users which just so happens to be a super user which is me. You should at least see one user there and that will be you. If you see more than one user right now, you've got a little bit of a problem unless you logged in twice with two different browsers. Then we've got popular articles and some site information. The rest of the stuff really isn't too interesting, but let's take a look at what this menu does or where this menu will take us.
First of all, we've got the little Joomla logo. If you click on that, it takes you back to the Joomla control panel. If we click on System, it opens a dropdown menu with different options. We can go back to the control panel, or check out Global Configuration. There are settings we'll probably change later when we start creating our site, default things we might want to turn off in Global Configuration. Global check-in is a little bit boring. Clear cache is there if there are problems, like images aren't loading or old images are showing. Purge expired cache is similar. System Information gives information about the system you're running Joomla on. Users: you probably won't deal with this much for now, but this is where you'll create a new user or manage existing users. You can create user groups or access levels for different users. Right now you should be a super user if you set Joomla up on your computer. If you want somebody else to have the same permissions, add a new user and make them a super user. There's also an option to mass email clients or users, which is useful when gathering an email list. We're probably not going to work with any of this for a little while; first we want to learn how to create a website in Joomla and then we'll come back to all of this stuff.
Menu manager and front-end menus
Next, let's take a look at Menus. This link takes us to the Menu Manager. Here we can add a new menu or edit existing menus. We have two menus: Main Menu and User Menu, and there are shortcuts to those menus. These menus show up on the front end of our website. If I come back to the front end of my website, you can see one menu which currently only has one menu item: Home. If you want to make another page or a link to another page, you can carry on adding links to this Main Menu and they will appear in this section of the website. I'm not sure if we're actually using the User Menu; I'm pretty sure it's not being used at the moment, which is why we can't see it.
Content management: articles, categories, media
Content is basically just content that's on our website: articles, which are these stories. These can be more than one article showing on a page at a time. If we visit the Article Manager, we might have more than one article, though we only have one right now. Depending on what content you chose when setting Joomla up, you might have different articles. We can add new articles and edit articles from here. Categories allow us to categorize these articles, which is useful for blogs or news websites. Featured articles are articles that will have a yellow star next to them, and that means they will appear on a featured page or be prioritized, for example to show the latest articles first. The Media Manager is where we upload images or videos or any other files to the website.
Components, extensions, modules explained
Components are where we would manage plugins and things we actually added to Joomla. We'll learn more about plugins in the future. If we want to add a feature Joomla doesn't have by default, you can make or install a plugin. There are plenty of existing plugins we can use; we'll install those and they'll appear in the Components section. Right now these are just default components Joomla has. Extensions: the Extension Manager takes us to a page where we can install plugins or extensions. For example, if we wanted to include an image slider, there are plugins that can do that. We can download those files and upload them to Joomla to add that functionality. Module Manager: Joomla is made up of modules. We can create different modules for different sections of the website. The Popular Tags section, Latest Articles, Login Form, and the logo are probably modules. In Module Manager you can see modules for the menu, popular tags, latest articles, login form and everything I mentioned at the front end. If you want something to appear permanently on many pages, make it once as a module and set which pages it should show on.
Templates, language, help, and closing
Template Manager is really cool. Joomla is made up of different templates and a template is basically a skin. I can change my skin to another one and the entire back end changed; I was changing the administrator skin. I'll change that back to Isis, the default Joomla template, and leave that for the back end. Now we'll change the front-end skin. Right now the front end is using Protostar. You can see locations for Administrator (backend skins) and Site (frontend skins). We're using Protostar; we can change that to Beez3 and it will change the front-end skin. Our website changed: the side menu moved to the left, a different picture, a different menu. That's what's cool about Joomla: you can create templates, and we're going to learn how to create a template later in the series. Templates change the front-end look but don't remove content. You'll still keep the article and modules. Language Manager isn't important for these tutorials since we'll work in English. Help has links to Joomla forums and places to get help. If you ever want to log out of Joomla, click the gear icon and choose Log Out or edit your account. That's pretty much all I have for you in this video. Don't forget to subscribe and feel free to leave a comment, like, or share this video. It's really going to help my channel grow and I will see you guys next time.
