Mastering Joomla

Question

Hi

I am planning to develop a portal using Joomla cms.

The portal has to be fully customized.

I would like to know some best tutorials and books for Joomla CMS customization.

Thanks

Answer 1

HowToJoomla is what you're looking for.

Answer 2

If you're going to be doing modules or components, the offical Joomla! wiki is by no means exhaustive, but can be useful for some common tasks. Check the 'Developers' section.

There are some decent tutorials at jlleblanc.com here: http://www.jlleblanc.com/content/blogcategory/0/51/

If you're a bit more of a hardened dev, then the Joomla API docs can be useful, but I do admit they're hard to browse (it's not always obvious which package any given class will be in), so it's often easier to search them using Google or similar.

Answer 3

In this order:

1. Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition) by Barrie M. North
2. Joomla! 1.5 Template Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver
3. Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development by Joseph LeBlanc
4. Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development: The Professional Guide to Programming Joomla! by James Kennard

Where you start on that list depends on your current ability and what your goals are. #1 is for beginners. If you want to do template design and already know html and css, then #2 is the place to start. If you are doing custom module and components and you already know PHP, then start with #3 and #4.