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!

The three main building blocks of Joomla are:

	Modules
	Menus
	Content

To see where these three building building blocks are mainly used in Joomla you can take a look at the following screenprint of a default Joomla Installation:

Let’s start with Modules

Modules are the blocks that you normally see in the left and the right hand columns. Modules can sometimes appear in other places as well, in fact, there are numerous module positions available for you to place your modules. The available module positions are determined by the template (more on templates later), so while in theory you have a lot of module positions available, not all of them are always coded into the template and your module will just not appear if you select a position that hasn’t really been catered for.

The ‘safe’ module positions are left, right, top, bottom and sometimes user1.

You can allocate more than one module to a position (for example on the left or the right). The modules will then be stacked on top of each other or next to each other, depending on the space available. You will be able to control the position of the modules within the same space with the position arrows, in the module manager.

You can edit module settings by selecting Site Modules from the menu manager, then either clicking on the module or selecting it and then selecting ‘Edit’.

Click here to view the module manager video tutorial  Please remember that you need to be logged in in order to be able to watch the video.

Each module has some unique parameters and settings, depending on the specific functionality of the module.

So what are modules exactly?
Modules are contained pieces of functionality such as a Login Box, or a Poll, or a Search box. You can even create a ‘Text only’ module – in other words, a module with your own text in, or you can install custom written modules.

Click here to watch the video tutorial on how to install a module.

But wait – here is something important to know about modules: The whole menu system is also controlled through modules, in fact, each menu that you see is contained within a module. So let’s take a look at menus