| Cross Reference: for more detail about levels of permission on a Joomla! site see, Controlling user access to a Joomla! Site | </td></table>
- This lists users.
- Click on the New icon
The User:[new] management page allows you to enter the details. To the left you enter the name and user name, as well as selecting the Group for the user. To the right there are options for other choices, including different editors. So you can make different choices for different users. If nothing is chosen under Parameters, then the Global choices will be used.
The options available for adding a new User and selection of the right Group
Allowing Users to register themselves
There are advantages and disadvantages in allowing people to register for the site themselves. The choice here depends on the purpose of the site and how many registrations you expect.
- It is set under Global Configuration
- Open the Global Configuration Manager in the Control Screen
- Choose the System Tab
Set Allow User Registration to Yes if you want visitors to be able to register themselves or to No if you do not want them to self-register.
It is here too that you choose the New User Registration Type. It defaults to Registered and so people who register themselves have to be given further permissions if they are going to edit or add content - or be an administrator.
Contacts
Contacts are not the same as users. They are a listing of people that it might be useful to keep in the web site. The important thing about this is that you can use the name of the contact to link to an email address in an article without actually showing the email address. This can add to the security of some sites. You can also link contacts to registered users.
The Contact Manager screen
The Contact facility allows you to add and maintain contact information, such as name, address, phone and e-mail.
The Contact Manager is selected from the menu.
- File:GScontactmenu.png
The Contact manager has the familiar options, including creating new contacts. The amount of detail that is needed will vary according to the purpose of the contacts for the particular site. There are also many options to display the information.
- See Help for full details
Note that Contacts are sorted according to Contact Categories. These too are managed from the Components menu shown above. You do not need a lot of these unless you have a lot of contacts, but you do need to add at least one Category for your Contacts before you can add your first Contact.
Content management
Articles, Menus, Sections and Categories
You have already worked with the Manager interfaces as part of setting up a site. See Hands-on setting up a Joomla! 1.5 site The best way to become familiar with the detail is to use the facilities and rely on the on-line Help for descriptions of what choices there are.
- Article Manager and Add New Article
- The Article Manager is where you can add and manage all the articles for your web site. You can publish, unpublish, edit, archive and much else.
- This is where you can alter the Section and Category of an Article and also delete unwanted content.
- See Background: get to know the Administrator Back-end
- Front Page Manager
- The Front Page Manager is the place where you control which Articles are displayed on the Front Page and in what order they are displayed.
- The Front Page is often the Home page of a web site, but it can be any page in the site.
- The Front Page is created using a Menu Item with the Front Page layout.
- Section Manager
- The Section Manager is the place where you can edit existing Sections and create new ones.
- Background: design the content - Sections and Categories
- Category Manager
- The Category Manager is where you can edit existing Categories and create new ones.
- Background: design the content - Sections and Categories
- Menu Manager
- The Menu Manager allows you add and alter Joomla!'s menus.
- You can re-position menus within the menu heirachy here too.
- Background:design appearance using Menus and Modules
Media Manager for pictures and other files
- Media Manager
- The Media Manager is a tool for uploading or deleting files in the /images/ directory on your web server. You can upload new files, delete existing ones and create sub-directories on the server hosting your web pages.
- Many images are added to Articles without using Media Manager, see Hands-on adding a picture
- Click on the icon
File:GSmediaMan.png Part of the screen of the Media Manager. The Upload button is at the bottom of the screen.
The Manager allows you to view the files as icons (Thumbnail view as shown in the screen shot) or as a details list called Detail view. You toggle from one to the other as needed.
The workspace on the screen shows a list of items and shows the contents of the /images directory within your installation of Joomla! The files and folders are also listed to the laft of the screen.
- Click on the name of a folder to show the contents
- Click on a thumbnail to display the image
Uploading files with Media Manager
The Media manager can be used to upload image and other file types to the Image folders on the web server.
- Browse for the file
- click the Start Upload button.
Note that the maximun file size limit can be altered in Global Configuration.
Global Configuration
Global configuration sounds rather grand and in some senses it is because it is here that you will find all the settings to configure the Site, connect to the database and configure connections to the server. The details are set when the Joomla! site is installed and thus they are best left alone! But there are a couple of things that you might want to alter. For example, you can set an editor as the default under the Site options.
- Global Configuration (you need Super-Administrator permissions)
- The Global Configuration Manager allows you to configure the Joomla! site with various settings.
- Open Global Configuration
This shows the System Settings: there are also choices for the Site and for the Server. A few of these can usefully be changed to allow the site to be set up as you want it. Alter the Server settings at your peril!
File:GSglobal.png An example of the System settings. These are the defaults that ship with Joomla!
An example - the settings for Media
This shows that a large number of file types are allowed. These can be removed or added to - depending on the site.
You can also alter the maximum file size for uploading files here.
Read the Warning message if you want to alter the location of the image files.
- File:GSglobalwarning.png
For full details - see the Help under Global Configuration Manager. It tells you what everything does, not why you might want to do it.
Backups
The frequency of backups depends on how often the site changes and how inconvenient it will be to lose any content. The detail depends on how your site is hosted. Ideally you have an automated system that does not depend on one individual pressing the right button. If your site is hosted on a shared server, the chances are that the servers are backed-up reliably but - it is worth checking.
LocalHost sample data
A hosting service
Hosting services normally have a management interface which includes a back-up facility. The backups are normally done by copying all the files relevant to Joomla! and other files in a Home directory. For example, this shows choices for c-Panel, a widely used interface.
The Backup Wizard allows partial backups as well as a full backup, and also copies files off the server.
In order to backup the site, you must also back up the database. For example, the database management choices for cPanel allow you to use phpMyAdmin interface for this.
Other possibilities for backups
There are some extensions written for Joomla! which manage backups from the Administrator pages. This is one example:-
Akeeba Backup is an open-source backup component for the Joomla! CMS. Its mission is simple: to create a site backup that can be restored on any Joomla!-capable server. Its possibilities: endless. It creates a full backup of your site in a single archive. The archive contains all the files, a database snapshot and an installer similar in function to the standard Joomla! installer.
Combined with Kickstart, sites can be transferred easily.
Security issues
There are a number of levels of security and a need for a bit of common sense in having policies appropriate to the purpose of the web site.
There are wise words here that do not need to be repeated:-
http://docs.joomla.org/Security_Checklist_1_-_Getting_Started
Further information
-
Help on all the Management pages has a link to the Joomla! documentation web site. In each Manager section Help gives comprehensive information about what all the features do.
On-line administrator's manual
Managing content
Security
Backups
How to back up using cPanel
Other backup tools
--Lorna Scammell March 2011
. In process of being updated:
