Jello: A Joomla site about the cello

A Joomla site about the cello

The original idea was for me to find or create a bunch of content about the cello. That didn't happen. At this point what we have is a "site template" for "cello content to come probably".

A Joomla site about the cello

The secret of Joomla: You get what you pay for. It's OK to start with a free template. The price is right, but they're clunky. Many companies offer templates for about $40. Like this one: Strata from JoomlaBamboo.

A Joomla site about the cello

If you know a little CSS and are a good detective, you'll be able to tweak. I changed the size of some headings, changed the color of the nav borders, lightened the footer block...

A Joomla site about the cello

The photos in the gold frame are of the cello section of the Philharmonique de Nice (France). It's an excellent orchestra. They play for the Opera de Nice, the ballet, and a chamber music series. The principal is from California.

A Joomla site about the cello

So how do you build a site using Joomla? Install Joomla on a hosting service. Better yet, use a hosting service that provides Joomla alrady installed. Get a book (Visual Quickstart Joomla is excellent.) Read the forums. Jump in.

A Joomla site about the cello

Workflow? Choose a template. Create a few articles. Decide on a site structure (sections? subsections? blog? gallery?). Build a menu and a homepage. Add and configure some modules. Publish them to positions on the grid.

Cello

1A gallery of famous celli. An excuse to use the Bamboo Box feature, complete with Prettybox popups and the reverse Roman blind "captify content" dohickey contraption.

and a link

Jello

2Info about the slideshow, the top overlay panel, and other features. I used something called a MicroBlog for the layout. Each topic is listed briefly with a thumbnail image on a page, with links to all content.

and a link

Typography

3Joomla templates are not known for typographic sophistication. I found some pleasant surprises in Strata, a template I got from JoomlaBamboo.

and a link

Modularity

4The basic Joomla installation (which, BTW, is free) comes with a dozen or so modules. Newsfeed, login, poll... Other modules may be included in templates that you purchase.

and a link

Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL License.

Icon Hints

Icon hints

For now, I'm displaying some code snippets and references for text styling. The typography pages have more complete information. This panel could also be used for logging in.

Content is placed within a div with the class blackbox... or greenbox, brownbox, bluebox, yellowbox, brownbox, purplebox.

Coding is p class="code", "new", "attachment", "calculator". Not shown are cut, dollar, euro, pound, sale, save, sound, support.

The same "paragraph" icons are available, smaller, for lists. List items may be styled individually (li class="xstyle"), or the whole list at can be styled at once (ul class="xstyle"...