Tour of the Joomla 1.5 Control Panel after logging in at /administrator. The dashboard has ten main buttons: Article Manager, Front Page Manager, Section Manager, Category Manager, Media Manager, Menu Manager, Language Manager, User Manager, and Global Configuration. Each one controls a different part of your site, from content and media to menus and user accounts.
Welcome to the first step of Joomla training. Your .com name simply followed by the word /administrator is going to get you to your main Joomla login page, and this is where you're going to enter your username and your password to enter the backend of the Joomla content management system. So whatever your .com name is, /administrator, simply type your assigned username and password and click login. This is going to take you to what we refer to as the control panel, and this is what I'd like to talk about in our first session. Because I'm an administrator, you're going to see a few more things during this training session than you may see when you log into your website, but I'm going to show you these things anyway. Across the top of the row, you'll see this first button that's add a new article. This is the button that you would click if you wanted to add a new article. To your website and subsequently to your database. Next to it is the tab, or the button rather, for Article Manager. This is the button that you would press if you want to see all the articles in your database. It allows you to find past articles, edit articles in the database, etc. The Front Page Manager is a button that you would choose when you want to move around or choose the stories that you want to appear on the front page of your website. As you can see, this is all pretty straightforward and pretty simple. The section manager allows you to come up with the sections that you want for the articles of your website. For example, a section might be cars, and then inside that section over here might be various categories. So if the section is called cars, various categories might be Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge, Mercedes-Benz. Okay, here is the Media Manager, this next button for you. The Media Manager is where you go to upload pictures or PDFs into your database. The next button is the Menu Manager. You'll notice along the top of your website are many menus, and this is the manager you use to go ahead and edit, add, change, and delete the various menus from the navigation of your website. The Language Manager allows you to manage the languages in which your website is seen. For the sake of our examples and tutorials, we're gonna stick with good old-fashioned English. If you are an administrator, you'll have a button called User Manager, which will allow you to manage all the users that have access to your database. And if also, if you're an administrator, you'll have a Global Configuration button. This button allows you to change the configuration of the website in a global capacity. So again, in review, Add a New Article— this button will allow you to add a new article to the database and to your website. Article Manager is where you go when you want to manage the various articles already in the database. The Front Page Manager is the button you would choose to manage the stories that you want to appear on the front page of your website. Sections of your website, like we gave an example, a section where you might have a section might be trucks, and within that section are going to be several categories. So if the section is trucks, the category— or the categories might be Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge, etc. So you're going to need to define sections in your section manager and categories in the category manager. Media manager is where you go to upload photos and PDFs, also video files, and the menu manager is where you'll go to manage the various menus on your website. From here, let's move on to add a new article, and that's the next training video.
