So Little Time, but here it is anyway...

I didn't anticipate this: there's so much else going wrong and needing sorting, but I promised I'd tell you about Saturday night's big breakthrough - the underlying structural concept of Joomla! that enabled me to get my site started and up.

And it's simply this:

While conventional "web site design" software asks you to design pages, and then slots those pages into menus (think about iWeb, fellow Mac users), Joomla! asks you to create menus, then builds pages that respond to those menu items.

It build the pages out of articles you write in Joomla!.

The kind of page you get is chosen within the menu, not within the article. Choose a "blog layout" item, you'll get the headings and opening paragraphs of every article in that section of your website. Choose a "article" item, you'll get a single article for that page.

So to get started easily, here's what I did:

• write a small number of articles, do not classify them by category or section, tick them all as "front page" articles on the article editing page
  
• go to menu manager / main menu / menu items
• add each article as internal link / articles / article layout
• you now have a simple usable website with each page navigable either from its "blog" opening on the front page or from the left-hand menu.

What I'm struggling with right now is that my very good friend Simon who's an SEO wizard is telling me to get search-engine-friendly URLs, but every time I tick the box for it in Joomla! all my pages lose their formatting and go to (particluarly ugly) text format layout. Ug! More on that as I figure out how to sort it.

'Til next time

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.