My company recently decided to turn their contract web development project (they finally brought their website in house) in to a full time position. As an established employee I have first crack at an interview. I've been deveoping at a semi-pro (some light freelancing and development of web aps for my company) level for a while now, but never really used a CMS.
Joomla seems to be a requirement of this project, so I have two months until the position is officially open. Where do I start?
Depends on the depth that you need to know. Joomla is based around the PHP/MySQL language which requires a fair amount of knowledge. If you don't have an understanding of these languages you may really struggle.
The Joomla coding is fairly straight forward with extensions being broken up into a number of categories (templates, components, plugins, modules, languages). When looking into the background of Joomla have a look into the procedural calls that are made on each event ie. onAfterRender. These events are the hardest part of Joomla.
Otherwise the http://forum.joomla.org site is quite comprehensive as well as the sites mentioned above.
Good luck!
Personally, the best way to learn something is to do it, and Joomla is pretty easy to play with, so pick a target architecture (possibilities are a Linux LAMP dev box, a Windows + Apache + PHP + MySQL box or a hosting company that offers Joomla support) and start playing. Unless you have a good reason I'd stick with Linux LAMP. Then build a system and start playing. Think about functionality that might be required and find out how it's done, then try it out. Things that come to mind would be;
Remember; see one, do one, teach one !
Regards,
Paul.