Vacation with Joomla

My wife wants to start her own business therefore she decided that she have to have a web pages. She bought a webhosting and a domain. However you need a content for the web site. And here starts my part. My only experience with creating a web was knowledge of html.


Fortunatelly, I discovered early that what she needs aren't a static web pages because she would like to add and create new content in an easy way. I had a few recommendation about the Joomla! CMS. It was good choice. The installation and setup of the Joomla was really easy. The only thing I did was that I copied the unzipped Joomla to the server. The rest of the installation happens on the joomla web pages where you define a connection to database etc. After a while I discovered a small problem with rights. I copied the files from Windows desktop to Linux server therefore I had to change rights of some files and directories directly on the server.


When I had the Joomla installed the real work begun. My wife didn't like the templates that were available for Joomla! for free. I started to create my own template for her web site. The template is based on one of the Joomla default templates - ja_purity. However that's one of nice features of the CMS - you can change the look of you site very easily without a change of your content.


Short notes about the customization:

1. Require strict definition of the behavior. I made something but she didn't like it and I had to change it at least 3 times. It took me lot of time (and energy :))
2. The images in header of the web site change according to selected menu item. I use $tmpTools->getCurrentMenuIndex(). To get an image from a directory on the website. Of course, the images are following some pattern like headerN.jpg.
3. Template colors. This part was really painfull. If you aren't a designer I wouldn't recommend to do it. However it's quite easy as you just have to change something in the css files.
   
4. Rest of the customization was playing with the images. Thanks to GIMP.
5. And of course, you have to create sections, categories, articles, define user roles add some modules, install plugins for the Joomla! CMS to make it look as you want ;)

The website is available at http://www.stestiazdravi.cz. Kamila is changing the content still however from my point of view I'm done with it.