Week 3 Completion Checklist

As described in the syllabus, each week you’ll have an ungraded assignment. Erin and I will not be grading these, nor will we be looking at your work (unless you specifically have a question that you ask in the forum). These ungraded assignments will become “chained” together to form your final project. Therefore, it’s strongly suggested that you work through this material each week! This will keep you up with the class, learning the material, and you will have your projects done well ahead of the due date!

Videos

  • The first video talks about menus. We’ll make links to single articles, as well as create your blog and tweak the way the blog looks.
  • The second video covers settings for all of that extra junk, like written by, publish date, the print options, and many other little annoyances that can be disabled easily. You can enable/disable items globally, in the menu, or on an article-by-article basis.
  • The third video talks about modules, module positions, and some of Joomla’s core modules.
  • The fourth video talks about components, linking components to menus, and some of Joomla’s core components.
  • The fifth video covers plugins and configuring some of Joomla’s plugins.
  • The sixth video talks about 3rd party extensions, the JED (Joomla Extension Directory) the “app store” (the JED available in the back end of Joomla), and evaluating extensions.

Each of these videos that I made for you comes with some additional lynda.com videos. These videos are for reference, for additional learning, or for more examples. You are not required to watch any of them. If you want to know more about a feature, though, this is a good place to start.

Workflow for adding extensions to your site

The best policy for changing ANY SETTING or INSTALLING NEW EXTENSIONS in ANY CMS:

1. BACK UP your site in full.

2. Change ONE SETTING. No more than one! Ideally, make a note of the original setting before you change it.

3. TEST to see the impact of the change.

a. Do you like it? Great!

b. Do you not like it? Change it back. Since you only changed ONE setting, you know EXACTLY what to change to reset it.

c. Broke the site entirely with that change? Can't even access the site anymore? That's why you made a backup!!!

Assignment

  1. Update your Joomla site if required. Make backups!!!!!
  2. Build out the menu for your website. By now, you should have all article-based content in your website, along with images. Some things may be displayed as blogs or lists, and some things may be individual articles.
  3. You need to include two “big” extensions and two “little” extensions for your site for the purposes of the project. You may include more extensions than this if you wish, so this is a minimum.
    • Two must be “big” extensions. A blog, a Joomla native full-featured calendar, full-featured image gallery, Paypal-based shopping cart, a customized form (not the one that comes with Joomla), online forum, or portfolio of work would count toward this. These extensions should add some interactivity to the site. It’s expected it will take 1½ -5 hours for you to research, identify, install, and configure each of these extensions. If it takes significantly less time than that, the extension may not be “big” enough (or significantly more and it's too big) .
      • Special note for those with shopping carts: Please do not plan to configure a shopping cart with your own payment system (i.e. you take your own credit cards online). This is expensive, time-consuming, and will not be covered in class. If you know how to do it, then fine, but we cannot provide support for this. If you are going to include a shopping cart, use PayPal for processing payments. You may leave the cart in “test” mode if desired.
      • Special note on calendars: Integrating a Google calendar into your site would be considered a “small” extension. Integrating a Joomla native calendar like JCalPro or jEvents would count for this requirement. Your calendar should have at least 10 unique events to count as a “big” extension. (In other words, one event with 10 repeats does not count as a “big” extension – though it could count as a “small” extension.)
    • Include at least two “small” extensions. This is a minor functionality enhancement to your site. It might include something like a rotating image banner, quote/testimonial module, site map, etc. In other words, this extension would likely take 30-90 minutes to research, identify, install, and configure, outside of time required for image preparation (if required). Extensions that come with Joomla may count as small extensions, so if you create a contact page or add a search box, these are small extensions.
  4. Akeeba Backup and JCE do NOT count toward these extensions for your site. It’s expected that you have these installed as part of previous lectures. Please don’t count these as extensions in your final extension count.
  5. When you turn in the project, you will detail what extensions you’ve used. Just keep that in mind for grading purposes. Uninstall extensions that are not in use – this is a best practice anyway, because unused and unmaintained extensions that are not part of core may eventually lead to a security issue for your site. To uninstall an extension, in the back end, go to Extensions – Extension Manager – Manage, choose the extension from the list by checking the box next to the name, and click on the Uninstall button towards the top of the page.

How should your site look at the end of this week

At the end of this week, you will have a site with roughed-out content and extensions. It's still not beautiful by any stretch, but that's what next week is all about!

This reflects my site building philosophy with a CMS, which is first you must have content before you have a look. The content is nearly all in place, so we're just about ready to start with a look!