Tutorials are rated by audience level, namely:

Joomby : Newbie to Joomla

JoomJock : Knows his way around Joomla. Knows how to change the front page around.

JoomZoom : Expert User level. Writes his own components.

Audience Level : Joomby  

It is often difficult for new users of Joomla to know where to start.

It can be quite daunting to open the administrator panel and be faced with a wide array of menus and icons. I know the one question that I had when I started was : “How do you get stuff onto the front page?”

This tutorial will therefore focus on a brief overview of how Joomla is structured and what the main building blocks are. Hopefully this will give you a better idea of how things fit together!

Audience Level : Joomby  

Menus in Joomla can sometimes be pretty mysterious - I think this is because they are managed from two different places at the moment (this is in Joomla up to version 1.0.11). These are the Menu Manager, and the Module Manager.

Audience Level : Joomby  

The great thing about Joomla is that there are literally thousands (well OK, over a thousand) add-ons available. At the moment they are still divided into three different categories, Components, Modules and Plugins (previously called Mambots). These are three very different types of animals and if you try and install a module as a component you will pick up an error.

Let's look at the distinction between these three again and then look at how to install them. We will also look at how to give your Joomla site an instant overhaul and facelift by installing a new template.

Audience Level : Joomby  

In this tutorial we are going to go into the techniques of updating your content in a bit more detail. We will give special attention to the WYSIWYG editor.

Audience level : JoomJock  

This tutorial was contributed by Bernhard Esterhyze, of www.WoozaShop.co.za, which you can visit for more information or to buy an online e-commerce shop.

The tutorial covers some basic information about installing and configuring your Virtuemart store and will be especially useful for developers.

We make use of the Uniform server to develop our websites locally. Once the customer has reviewed the website on his local PC and we have made any changes required, we then upload the final version of the website to the server.

Melaina Gross, from Cantaloupe web design and email marketing contributed this tutorial.