4. Configuring Joomla!

This chapter will explain the basic configuration options for your Joomla! site. Although Joomla! installs with default settings for all configuration options, it is important to understand them and to adjust them as appropriate for your site.

Basic Configuration Steps for Your New Site

This chapter will explain some basic configuration settings to get you started with your new Web site, but it is in no way a comprehensive review of all the configuration options that you can take advantage of. As you work with Joomla!, you will be using many of the configuration options, and over time you will want to make large and small adjustments.

In the previous chapter at the end of installation, you could choose to click either the Site or the Administrator button to visit your new Joomla! Web site. If you look at the front end of the site, you can see how a Joomla! site looks to people surfing the Web.

One of the most important and powerful features of Joomla! is its templating system. Templates change the look and feel of a Web site but they do not change its basic functionality. In this book you will see this because we discuss both Joomla! 2.5 and Joomla! 3, and the most important differences between them have to do with the templates. In some instances we will show images from both versions, but in many instances we will show just one or the other, most often Joomla! 3. Keep in mind that in the vast majority of situations the only difference between Joomla! 2.5 and Joomla! 3 is what the colors and icons are, not the behavior or the general location of things (although the location on the page may differ).

If you haven’t already done so, log in to the administrator back end of your site by going to www.your_domain_name.com/administrator and entering the username and password you set up in the configuration step during installation. If you are already logged in to the administrator, you can visit the front end of your site.

When you log in to the administrator back end of your site, the screen that is presented is the Control Panel. Sometimes people refer to this as the admin panel, administrator screen, or by various other names, but the name that is associated with it in the Site menu, as shown in Figure 4.1, is Control Panel. The Control Panel offers quick links to some of the most-used administrator options. In Joomla! 3 this is in the form of a list of links (as shown in Figure 4.1a), and in Joomla! 2.5 it is in the form of clickable icons in the center of the page (as shown in Figure 4.1b). Other choices of administrator functions are across the top of the screen as a menu bar with drop-down menu items. For the purposes of this book, we will explain items by going to their menu item in the top menu bar rather than using the quick links or icons.

Figure 4.1. Administrator back-end Control Panel in (A) Joomla! 3 and (B) Joomla! 2.5

Editing the Super User

The first stop for configuring your new Web site is to open the User Manager from the top menu (A) shown in Figure 4.1, make the administrator account more secure, and set the user settings.

Once you have entered the User Manager (shown in Figure 4.2) by clicking the User Manager menu item, you will see a list of the users who are currently registered at your site. Because your site is a fresh site, you will see only one user with the username you provided when installing and the password you created. It will also have the name Super User. You can change the name to your actual name; also, if you used an insecure password (such as your name or “password”), this is where you should change that. You do not want to make it easy for other people to guess your password and gain access to your site. To edit a user, click the name of the user under the Name column. This will open the User Edit screen. This screen will show input boxes: Name, Username, E-mail, New Password, Verify Password, Group, Block User, Receive System E-mails, Register Date, Last Visit Date, Back-end Language, Front-end Language, User Editor, Help Site, Time Zone, and, if linked to a contact, Contact Information.

Figure 4.2. The User Manager in Joomla! 3. This differs from the User Manager in Joomla! 2.5 only in the toolbar display (icons are larger than words in Joomla! 2.5) and the location of submenu and filters (which in Joomla! 2.5 are displayed horizontally).

The User Manager illustrates some of the differences between Joomla! 2.5 and Joomla! 3 that apply across all of the administrator. For example, the toolbars at the top of the managers in Joomla! 3 have buttons with words and small icons, while in Joomla! 2.5 the icons are larger than the words. Also the filters in Joomla! 2.5 are displayed horizontally while in Joomla! 3 they are on the left. There is no difference in what they do, simply a shift in how they are laid out.

At this time there are only a few things you will want to take care of in terms of basic configuration. The first is to change the administrator name if you haven’t chosen one that is appropriate or if you have used “admin” as the name. It should be something that is relevant to your site if you are planning on having your administrator user as an author of articles, and the article details and author name show on the front end of the Web site. You may also want to change your username, which is what you use to log in to your site, to something that is not easily guessed. You can also at this time change your password and verify it, but changing the password isn’t necessary if you created a strong one during installation. If you do change your password, remember to record it in a safe place. The only other thing to change is your time zone to reflect the time zone you want the administrator user to have. Also, you should notice that your group is set to Super Administrator. This means that you have control of the site and all the settings. When you have finished making changes, click Save, which is the left button on the toolbar. Saving will bring you back to the User Manager.

Basic Global Configuration Options

Once you have edited the Super Administrator user to be more secure, you can move on to the next step of configuring your Web site by configuring a few of the options in the Global Configuration page. In Joomla! 3 you will find this on the System menu at the top left of your screen, just to the left of the User link. In Joomla! 2.5 select it from the Site menu drop-down located at the top left of the screen.

The Global Configuration page is composed of five areas:

• Site options located in the Global Configuration affect the Web site at the site or public level, meaning what people see when they browse your Web site. For example, this includes whether the site is online or offline, the default editor for all users, and the metadata for your Web site. It is also where you can implement some search engine optimization (SEO) settings such as friendly URLs.

• System options are configuration options that affect how the Joomla! CMS program works. They involve some permissions and how some data is handled by the system.

• Server options are configuration options that affect how Joomla! and the settings for your server work together.

• Permissions are used to control which user groups can take what actions on your Web site.

• Text Filters determine who can save what kind of text on your site. This does not refer to words or the actual content; it relates to the need to keep your site secure and to avoid letting users put malware and other destructive content into your Web pages.

Site

Each of the tabs contains a number of different areas. On the Site tab the first area contains the Site Settings. In this block the most important field is the Site Name, as shown in Figure 4.3. The site name should match what you entered during the installation procedure. If you have changed your mind and want to change the name, the Site Name input box is where you can do that.

Figure 4.3. Global Configuration Site Settings

Most of the remaining fields in the Site Settings refer to what is displayed if you choose to take your site offline. If you choose to set Site Offline to Yes, you can create a custom message and insert an image for your site. Taking your site offline with this feature impacts only the front end of your site, that is, the part that is shown to site visitors. Normally you will have no need to do this, but occasionally if you redesign your site or have a problem you may want to do so. If you wish to have your site offline while you are building your site, change the Site Offline option to Yes, type a message to be displayed to visitors, and add an image such as your logo if desired. If you do this, in addition to your image and message, a Login module will be displayed on the home page, as shown in Figure 4.4. You and other users you authorize will be able to log in to the site and see the home page.

Figure 4.4. Default display of your site in offline mode

The Metadata Settings section is the next area on this screen, as shown in Figure 4.5. Metadata is not directly displayed to site visitors but is included invisibly in each Web page. It is used by search engines and browsers to store information about your site and sometimes even to change how your site is displayed. Since search engines are how people find your site and browsers are how users view your site, it is important that your metadata be accurate and complete.

Figure 4.5. The metadata fields with information added

The Site Meta Description field should include a relatively short sentence that is a good summary of what your site is about. Try to keep your description to 120 characters total to allow the full description to be used by search engines when it is displayed in search results. Use more than 120 to 150 characters, and your description has a chance of being shortened in the display.

The Site Meta Keywords field should be a short list of keywords or keyword phrases, separated by commas. Best practices for using keywords tend toward the importance of quality over the quantity of keywords used. A good place to start with building your keywords is to come up with five basic terms that relate to your Web site and enter those terms into the Site Meta Keywords input box. Next, create a two- to four-word phrase with each of those basic terms, using words that convey action and plurals and synonyms of your basic five terms. If you have a physical location, make sure that you include geographic information in your keywords.

The Robots field tells search engine “bots” how to travel through your site and what information they should record. Unless you do not want your site included in search engine results, you should leave the default settings for this.

Content Rights tell the world whether and under what circumstances they can reuse your site content. The simplest thing is to include something like “Copyright <Your Name>, All rights reserved,” but you can also choose to give more detailed licensing information.

The Show Author Meta Tag will add the name of the author of each content item to the pages on which those items are displayed. This means that someone searching for that author’s name will be able to find the content on your site.

As your site grows and you have a chance to see statistical data on how people use search engines to find your site and what keywords they use, you can adjust your Site Meta Keywords setting to adapt.

On the right side of the screen are the SEO Settings, as shown in Figure 4.6. There are five settings in this area, and four of them concern setting the URLs for your site to be search-engine-friendly (SEF) and more readable by your users than what PHP would create on its own.

Figure 4.6. Global Configuration site settings for search-engine-friendly URLs

Dynamic sites like the sites that are created with Joomla! use programming to construct the URLs to the content. Joomla! has the ability to create URLs that are easy for people and search engines to read that are different from the URLs the software uses to render the page. If you were to enable all of the options, you would go from this URL:

www.mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=1&Itemid=50

to this:

www.mysite.com/the-news.html

Three factors go into turning on SEF URLs:

• Making the URL readable: This means understandable (sometimes called “human readable”) but also allows you to represent the content you are displaying with a URL that will contain appropriate keywords or phrases, giving you an SEO boost. This is set to On by default.

• Using Apache mod_rewrite: This is the underlying server technology that executes the commands that create the rewritten URL. To use this, you have to be on a server that is running Apache and that has mod_rewrite enabled. You also have to specifically rename the htaccess.txt file that is included with Joomla! to .htaccess or incorporate the code in that file into an existing .htaccess file (see the tip).

• Adding a suffix to URLs: Suffixes describe the file type that is being displayed. Web pages when displayed are often given the suffix .html or .htm.

Figure 4.7 shows the Cpanel File Manager and the htaccess.txt file as well as the default .htaccess that a number of hosts put in the root of a hosting account. To see this on your host you may need to check Show Hidden Files (dotfiles) when opening the File Manager. This is because files beginning with a dot are hidden by default.

Figure 4.7. Cpanel File Manager showing the .htaccess file. You may need to select the option on your File Manager to display files starting with a dot.

The fourth option for SEO allows you to use what are known as Unicode characters (characters outside of the basic Latin letters and numbers) in your URLs. If your site will feature content that is not entirely in English, you may want to enable this option. If you do not, and you then use accented characters or characters from a language such as Chinese in constructing a URL, these will be transliterated into Latin characters.

The final option for SEO has nothing to do with URLs, but it does have to do with what is displayed in places not directly on your page but in your browser such as in the title area, on any tabs, and in bookmarks. An example of where these are located in the Firefox browser is shown in Figure 4.8. You can decide whether or not to include your site title in the page title and if so, whether it should be before or after the title of the specific page.

Figure 4.8. Location of the page title in the Firefox browser. You can add the site name to this.

Cookie settings (directly below the SEO settings) are relevant only for advanced users with complex sites and should generally be left blank.

System

The System tab contains a number of settings, most of which should never be touched. Unless you are developing a new extension or have to debug a problem, you will never need to change these. The sole exception would be if you find that while you are working you need to log in repeatedly, you may want to increase your session length. You may also want to turn on caching if your site has a lot of visitors, but that is unlikely to be the case in the early months of operation. If you do want to experiment with caching, simply change the setting to Yes.

Server

The Server tab also contains a number of fields that should not normally be changed. However, you will want to set the mail settings to match the information provided by your host. Most hosts have documentation about what mail server you should use and other needed information. We recommend leaving the FTP settings blank if you did not need to enter them when installing. If for some reason you need to enable the FTP layer, you can simply enter the information when needed rather than saving it in the configuration.

You will also want to set the locale to the time zone that you want your site to be operating under by selecting the appropriate time zone from the drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 4.9.

Figure 4.9. Global Configuration server setting to change the time zone

Permissions

The Permissions tab is where you assign the basic rules that grant or deny users permission to do specific actions on your site. This is part of the Access Control List (ACL) system. In addition to action permissions, the ACL system is used to control who can view specific content on your site. The Permissions tab that you see in Global Configuration is the sitewide level of the ACL system.

User Groups

On the Permissions tab the first thing that you should notice is that there is a slider for each user group as seen in Figure 4.10. The list of groups is the same as the list we saw in the User Manager. You are the super administrator of your site, but you don’t want all the users of your site to have permission to do everything, such as changing your design or switching your database. User groups are the way that Joomla! allows you to manage which users can take various actions on your site and who can see what content. As you create new users, you will need to decide what user groups to put them in. You can add and delete user groups, but for most users who are new to Joomla! the default groups will work well.

Figure 4.10. Global permissions page

There are three default user groups that have access to log in to the administrator back end of a Joomla! site:

• Super Administrator: The Super Administrator group has access to all the administrator functions in all areas of the site. Your site must have at least one user who is a super administrator. Users in this group cannot be deleted unless another super administrator first removes them from the group. Only super administrators can grant other users the super administrator rights by assigning them to the Super Administrator group. Only super administrators can change the group of other super administrators.

Be very careful whom you make a super administrator. This all-encompassing level of access should be given only to those with whom you can trust your site and site information. Never give your super administrator username or password on a public forum. Do not give your super administrator username or password to anyone in an e-mail unless you know and trust the person receiving the e-mail.

• Administrator: The Administrator group has slightly restricted access to the back-end (administrator) functions, which is better explained by what they cannot do. Administrators cannot add a user to the Super Administrator group or edit a super administrator’s account. Administrators do not have access to the Global Configuration settings. Administrators cannot use the mass mailing functions of the site through the messaging system.

• Manager: The Manager group is usually used to group together the user accounts that will be managing the site content. A manager cannot add or edit users; cannot install modules, components, or plugins; and may have limited access to work with components in the administrator back end. However, a manager can create, publish, and delete content from your site. So managers should be people whom you trust to do those things in a responsible way.

A second set of four user groups cannot log in to the administrator back end, but they have increasing privileges to do things on the front end of your site. You may recognize the names of some of these groups as their privileges reflect the workflow of print publications:

• Registered: This group of users can log in to the site and see content that is designated for registered users only.

• Author: This group can log in and see registered-only content but can also create new content if you make those options available. Authors also can edit their own articles.

• Editor: This group can do everything authors can do and can also edit articles created by other people.

• Publisher: This group can do everything editors can do but can also change the published state of articles.

If you click on the tab (in Joomla! 3) or slider (in Joomla! 2.5) for each user group name in turn, you will see that it opens up and each contains the same list of actions, but they are set differently for each group. Figure 4.11 shows the slider for the Editor group.

Figure 4.11. Global Permission Settings for the Editor group

The basic list of actions is as follows:

• Site Login: This controls whether the group can log in to the front end of your site.

• Admin Login: This controls whether the group can log in to the site administrator.

• Offline Access: This controls whether the group can log in to the front end of your site when the site has been taken offline in the Global Configuration.

• Super Admin: This controls whether the group has super admin rights, which means that they can set the Global Configuration and create new super admins. These are considered super powers in that a member of a Super Admin group cannot be denied permission to do any action.

• Access Administration Interface: This controls whether the group can have access to the administration for components. For example, we previously looked at the User Manager. This permission would control whether a group would have access to the component managers.

• Create: This controls whether a group can create new content, such as articles.

• Delete: This controls whether a group can delete existing content.

• Edit: This controls whether a group can modify existing content created by anyone.

• Edit State: This controls whether a group can edit the state of an item. In Joomla! there are several states an item can be in: Published, Unpublished, Archived, and Trashed.

• Edit Own: This controls whether individual users in a group can edit items that they have created.

There are four possible settings for each permission: Not Set, Inherited, Allowed, and Denied. Notice that for the Public group, by default all permissions are Not Set. This is the only default group where Not Set is used. If a permission is not set, it means that the user is not allowed to do it. The only thing users in the Public group can do is view the public content on your site.

Next, look at the permissions for the Super Users group, which are shown in Figure 4.12. Users in this group have all possible permissions, and they cannot be overridden, which is why they have locks next to them. This is because the Super Admin permission for them is set to Allowed. All other permissions are set to Allowed because of this, so it is inherited from the Super Admin permission.

Figure 4.12. Global Permission Settings for the Super Users group

Notice that the remaining groups are arranged in two branches. One branch consists of the Manager group and the Administrator group. The other branch starts with Registered users and contains Authors, Editors, and Publishers in sequence.

One important aspect of the permissions system is the idea of inheritance. If you look at either of the branches, you will see inheritance in action. Inheritance works by passing permissions along the two branches. For example, in the Manager group, users have been given permission for all actions except Super Admin and Access Administrator Interface. This is indicated with a setting of Allowed and the word Allowed in the Calculated Setting column for the actions they are permitted, and Inherited as the setting and a red icon with the words Not Allowed in the Calculated Settings column. The Not Allowed is inherited from the Public group. So, where the members of the Manager group were explicitly given permission for actions, they are Allowed. Where they were not given permission, they are Not Allowed. Calculated permissions refer to the permissions a group has inherited rather than being assigned directly.

Now looking at the Administrator group, we can see that members of this group have been given an additional permission: Access Administrator Interface is set to Allowed. All other permissions are the same as for the Manager group and are inherited from it. Although the Global Configuration for permissions does not include any Denied settings, these work in the same way. If a group is denied a specific permission, that denial is inherited by groups further down the branch and cannot be reversed. In contrast, it is possible to have a branch with groups that are set to Allowed for a specific permission and then change the settings for a group further down the branch to Denied.

There is a second concept that enters into the ACL system which is that of viewing access levels. This controls what people can see (rather than what actions they can take). These are not managed in Global Configuration but rather in the User Manager. The User Manager is also where new user groups are created.

This discussion of how to set the global permissions introduced some of the basic concepts of access control in Joomla! such as user group, super admin, inheritance, and viewing access level. However, it has many more complex features. Overall, the ACL system, as it is known, is powerful but complex. In terms of managing your site, our suggestion is that you first use the default groups and access levels, and then, if needed, you can modify them or add new groups and levels. If you do choose to use these advanced features, plan carefully and avoid making your system overly complex.

Text Filters

The final tab in Global Configuration is Text Filters. These filters control what kind of text users are able to save when they create content. One of the unfortunate aspects of managing a Web site is that sometimes users will try to create content that includes harmful or malicious code. Like permissions, the filters use the User Group structure, as seen in Figure 4.13.

Figure 4.13. Text Filters screen

Notice that in the default settings the Super Users and Administrator groups are set to No Filtering. This is because it is assumed that these groups are trustworthy and will not attempt to harm your site. Most other groups have “blacklists” of specific kinds of text that they are not allowed to save. The Public and Registered groups have even stricter restrictions. This is because they are often the users you know least well and therefore do not know how trustworthy they are. Although in the default installation of Joomla! these users cannot create any content, as you add features to your site this may change. For most Joomla! sites leaving the text filters exactly as they are on installation will work well.

Before leaving Global Configuration, make sure you save your work by clicking on the Save button in the toolbar. In version 2.5 this is one of the few parts of Joomla! that will let you exit a screen without clicking either Save or Close.

Configuration Settings in Specific Components

Each component in Joomla! has its own configuration options. While most of these concern very specific aspects of how Web pages made with that component will display, there are some that should be considered part of the baseline configuration of your site. For each core component and for most components you will install, you can access the configuration by clicking the link for that component on the Components menu and then clicking on the Options button or icon, shown in Figure 4.14. In Joomla! 3, you can also get to the component options using the tab on the left side of the Global Configuration screen. This will give you a screen (a modal pop-up in Joomla! 2.5), often with tabs. These allow you to set the default options.

Figure 4.14. Options toolbar icon in (A) Joomla! 3 and (B) Joomla! 2.5

User Manager Configuration

In the configuration for users, there are only two things you may want to change right away, as shown in Figure 4.15. The first is whether users can register an account on your site. Usually this is enabled only if you plan on having people register on your site to read content or purchase something or have some other need to get details about your users for interactive purposes. If you do not plan on using this function, it is best to disable it by toggling the Allow User Registration option to No. You can always enable registration at a later time by toggling it to Yes.

Figure 4.15. User Manager configuration for user registration

The second is to decide whether you want users to be able to see and change user parameters when they are logged in to your site. For most sites, we turn this option off to retain consistency, especially if there are multiple users who are creating or editing content. Toggling this option to Hide prevents users who log in to the front end from editing user parameters such as front-end language, back-end language, user editor, help site, and time zone. If toggled to Show, as shown in Figure 4.16, the previously listed user parameters will be shown to logged-in front-end users. If you install a third-party editor, you can set it globally in the site settings that were covered previously in this chapter.

Figure 4.16. User Manager configuration for user parameter visibility

Figure 4.17 shows the front-end view with Front-end User Parameters toggled to Hide, and Figure 4.18 shows the front-end view with them set to Show.

Figure 4.17. Front-end view of logged-in user editing profile details with Front-end User Parameters hidden

Figure 4.18. Front-end view of logged-in user editing profile details with Front-end User Parameters showing

The User Manager also contains two important tabs relating to the ACL system: User Groups and Viewing Access Levels. Visiting the User Groups tab, you will see the same list of groups as you saw when editing your user data and in the Global Configuration Permissions tab. If you choose to create a new user group, click the New button on the toolbar and you will get a screen like that in Figure 4.19. Give the new group a name and select one of the existing groups as its parent. If you select Public as the parent, your group will start a new branch in addition to the three that are already present. If you select one of the existing groups as the parent, the new group will be added as a new branch coming off of the branch of which the existing group is a part. In Figure 4.19 a new group, Friends, has been created that has Registered as its parent.

Figure 4.19. Creating a new user group, Friends, with Registered as the parent

Next, visit the View Access Levels tabs. You will see that there are three levels: Public, Registered, and Special. If you click on the name of one of the levels, you will again see the list of user groups. For example, Figure 4.20 shows the Special viewing access level. Notice that it has checks next to Manager, Author, and Super Users. That means that these user groups and any user groups that inherit from them (such as Editor and Publisher inheriting from Author, and Administrator inheriting from Manager) will see content that is assigned to the Special viewing access level.

Figure 4.20. The editing screen for the Special viewing access level

The default Public viewing access level includes all users plus site visitors who are not logged in. The default Registered level excludes users who are not logged in but includes all other users. The default Guest group includes users who are not logged in but not those users who are logged in.

There are two common points of confusion about viewing access levels. First, if you create a new user group, you must remember to add it to one or more viewing access levels. If you don’t, users in that group will be able to see only what is visible to the Public access level. So we will put our Friends group into the Registered view level. Often, however, you will want to create a new viewing access level for each new group that you create. Second, super users cannot see everything. While the permissions for user groups with Super Admin permission cannot ever be denied, the same does not hold true for viewing. So, if you want your super users to be able to see everything, make sure you always assign them to any new viewing access levels you create. You do this by checking the box for the Super Admin group in each viewing access level.

Media Manager Configuration

The link to the Media Manager is found at the bottom of the Content submenu of the Administrator menu. Click on the Options button. As shown in Figure 4.21, you can change the configuration of the Media Manager to set the types of media files users are allowed to upload and the maximum file size. The Permissions tab allows you to restrict which groups are allowed to upload media files. You would want to do this because some users might upload inappropriate files or files that are so large that they will overwhelm your site resources. The default settings work well for the majority of sites.

Figure 4.21. Configuration options for the Media Manager

Smart Search Configuration

Smart Search is an advanced search option for Joomla! In a Joomla! site you can choose whether to use Smart Search, basic Search, or a third-party search option. For most sites Smart Search is a good solution. The major exception at the time this book was written is when your content is mainly in a language that uses multibyte characters, such as Japanese or Chinese. To enable Smart Search you need to go to the Plugin Manager. First click on Extensions in the administrator menu, then Plugin Manager. On the list of plugins find the one called Content-Smart Search. Check the check box for it, and then click the Enable button on the toolbar or click on the status icon next to the name. When it is enabled, it will display a green check mark as shown in Figure 4.22. Your content will now automatically be indexed by Smart Search.

Figure 4.22. The Smart Search plugin has been enabled by checking the check box and then clicking the Enable button. This is indicated by the check mark next to its name.

Other Site Defaults

Although they are not strictly speaking part of configuration, there are a few other items that set the basic framework for your site.

Default Menu Item

When people come to your Web site by entering just your domain, for example, http://mydomain.com, the page they come to is called the default page or more commonly the home page. In Joomla! you designate a home page using the menu system. Go to the Menu Manager by clicking on the Main Menu submenu of the Menus item in the Administration menu. As seen in Figure 4.23, you have only one menu item at this point and it is marked with a yellow star in the Home column. In this case it is a menu item with the name Home. If you add a new menu item and then click the star for it, it will change the default page. We’ll go through the steps for this in Chapter 5.

Figure 4.23. The Menu Manager with the one default menu item created by installing Joomla!

Default Template Style

The overall design of your Web site—the colors, images, typography, and layout—is an essential part of your site. In Joomla! these are controlled by templates. You can use many templates and variations of templates called template styles in one site, but you must make one template style the default for your entire site. That means it will be used whenever you have not specified a different style. To set the default template style, on your Administration menu click on Extensions and then Template Manager. This gives you a list of template styles, some of which are used for the front-end part of your site (these say Site in the Location column) and some for the Administrator. The Default column has two yellow stars marked, indicating the default template used for each location. You can change the defaults by clicking on the empty stars. After selecting a new default, refresh the page and you will see a new template in use. Figures 4.24 and 4.25 respectively show the Template Manager using the Hathor default style and a front-end site using the Beez5 default style in Joomla! 2.5 (at this time Hathor and a new version of Beez called Beez3 are available in Joomla! 3), along with the default templates Isis and Protostar.

Figure 4.24. The Template Manager using the Hathor default style in Joomla! 2.5

Figure 4.25. Site with the Beez5 default style in Joomla! 2.5

Conclusion

In this chapter you learned some of the basic ways your site can be configured. As you gain more experience with managing your site, you may want to adjust some of the more advanced settings such as enabling caching. However, we urge you to be cautious in doing so for any of the settings (such as text filtering and the Media Manager) that have security implications.

Now that your site is configured, you are ready to start creating and managing content for it.