Beginners

If this is your first Joomla site or your first web site, you have come to the right place. Joomla will help you get your website up and running quickly and easily.

Start off using your site by logging in using the administrator account you created when you installed Joomla!.

Explore the articles and other resources right here on your site data to learn more about how Joomla works.(When you're done reading, you can delete or archive all of this.) You will also probably want to visit the beginners' areas of the Joomla documentation and support forums.

You'll also want to sign up for the Joomla Security Mailing list and the Announcements mailing list. For inspiration visit the Joomla Site Showcase to see an amazing array of ways people use Joomla to tell their stories on the web.

The basic Joomla! installation will let you get a great site up and running, but when you are ready for more features the power of Joomla! is in the creative ways that developers have extended it to do all kinds of things. Visit the Joomla! Extensions Directory to see thousands of extensions that can do almost anything you could want on a website. Can't find what you need? You may want to find a Joomla professional on the Joomla! Resources Directory.

Want to learn more? Consider attending a Joomla! Day or other event or joining a local Joomla! Users Group. Can't find one near you? Start one yourself.

As you make your Joomla! site using the extension you will control the details of the display using parameters. Parameters control everything from whether the author's name is displayed to who can view what to the number of items shown on a list.

Default parameters for each component are changed using the Options button on the component toolbar.

Parameters can also be set on an individual item, such as an article or contact and in menu links.

If you are happy with how your site looks, it is fine to leave all of the parameters set to the defaults that were created when your site was installed. As you become more experienced with Joomla! you will use parameters more.

Congratulations! You have a Joomla! site! Joomla! makes it easy to build a website just the way you want it and keep it simple to update and maintain.

Joomla! is a flexible and powerful platform, whether you are building a small site for yourself or a huge site with hundreds of thousands of visitors. Joomla is open source, which means you can make it work just the way you want it to.

Your installation includes sample data, designed to show you some of the options you have for building your website. In addition to information about Joomla! there are two sample "sites within a site" designed to help you get started with builidng your own site.

The first site is a simple site about Australian Parks. It shows how you can quickly and easily build a personal site with just the building blocks that are part of Joomla!. It includes a personal blog, weblinks, and a very simple image gallery.

The second site is slightly more complex and represents what you might do if you are building a site for a small business, in this case a Fruit Shop.

In building either style site, or something completely different, you will probably want to add extensions and either create or purchase your own template. Many Joomla! users start off by modifying the templates that come with the core distribution so that they include special images and other design elements that relate to their site's focus.