When logging in to your Joomla control panel it may look complicated and overwhelming at first however it is far from it once you have a basic idea of how Joomla works.

First of all to manage all aspects of your site you need to log in to your Joomla control panel which is accessed by appending administrator to your domain name i.e. yoursite.com/administrator

Your Joomla site is simply a collection of modules which surround your main content. Your main content is managed in the article manager section of your Joomla control panel and you modules are managed in the module manager section. All of the content on your site is either stored in a module or is stored as an article.

Some people get confused by the term "article" however an article is basically a new page, so if you want to add a new page to your site you create it in the article manager. The article can be anything you want, you can create the content in the built in Joomla editor or you can create the content in an HTML editor.

Modules

Joomla comes with it's own modules such as the search, member login and feed display modules however there are three modules in particular that you are likely to use the most and thats the menu, custom, and special HTML modules.

Menu Module

Managing menus on your site can be a little confusing at first as certain tasks you do in the menu manager and others you do in the module manager. This is because menu's are in fact modules but in order to make them easier to manage Joomla has a menu manager section as well.

If you add a new menu by clicking the 'new' button in the menu manager this creates a new menu module. You can also add a new menu by doing the same thing in module manager and selecting the menu module however I have found it works better adding new menus in the menu manager.

The menu managers sole purpose is to manage the links in your menu(s) whereas the module manager is where you choose the location and appearance of your menu(s) among other things.

The two most common links you will want to add to your menu are external links to other sites such as affiliate links and internal links to your articles. Both of these are achieved by either selecting the menu you wish to add the link to in the 'Menus" drop down menu or by clicking the icon adjacent to the menu in the menu manager.

Now to add an external link click the 'New' icon and click 'External'. The title is what the link or anchor text will be, the alias is what will show in the URL of the link (if you leave this blank it will automatically add the title, recommended for beginners!), then add the link in the 'Link' field. It's best to make external links open in a new window so as to keep traffic on your site so you can do that by selecting 'New Window with Browser Navigation'. Without browser navigation means the new window will not have the menus, navigation bar, etc.

To add a link to an article simply do the same as above however instead of selecting 'External' select 'Article'. You will notice there are several different options, you can link directly to an article, a category or a section and you can choose between different layouts. I recommend you simply try out each one to see what they do I will explain more about each one later but for now we just want to link directly to an article so select 'Article Layout'. As above you can enter the title and alias, the link is added for you. To select the article you wish to link to click select in the 'Parameters Basic' section and select the article.

Hidden Menu

Occasionally you may want to create a page on your site however you don't want to add it to a menu. Unfortunately as far as I know an article is not linkable until it is added to a menu. The way I have gotten around this is to create a menu and assign it to a position which doesn't show up on the site. You can access it in menu manager it's named 'Hidden Manager'. If you open it you will notice three links in there including the newsletter thank you page, the dotcomology page and sitemap.

Custom Module

The custom module is used to add content which you don't want in the main content section. For example if you want to add some content to the side bar such as a banner or some text you would use the custom module. The header and footer module's have been created using the custom module which allows you to easily add whatever content you like. You can add new custom modules by clicking the 'new' button in module manager and selecting the custom module.

Special HTML Module

The special HTML module is a third party module which I have included which allows you to paste code directly into a module. This is ideal if you have been supplied some code and want to paste it straight into your site. You can actually add HTML to the custom module however it may not always work.

Module Positions

Each Joomla template is made up of a number of positions where you can display your modules. If a certain position contains no modules then the template will stretch to accommodate the empty position allowing you to have a lot of flexibility over how your page appears. Each page can be configured differently than the others. To make life easier I have created two separate versions of this template, a 1 and 2 column version. So instead of switching the modules off to remove the sidebars you simply need to apply the template you wish to use to whichever pages you like. That is done in the template manager section.

The template I have decided to use for the new PIPS 2.0 site is the Chromatophore template by Rockettheme. You can actually find out everything you need to know about the template on their site http://demo.rockettheme.com/apr08_j15/

Here is a diagram of the positions available. NOTE: I have changed the banner position to 'Header' and have added a 'Footer' position to the bottom of the site.

To change the position of a module simply go to module manager select the module and in the 'Details' section you will see a drop down menu labeled 'position', the positions in that menu will match the positions in the diagram. Please note that I have made a few modifications to the template such as adding the header and footer positions.