Welcome to our new tutorial on mastering the basics: Joomla 5 tutorial for beginners. Whether you have some basic Joomla experience or are just a beginner, this tutorial will help you learn the essential skills to create and manage your website using Joomla 5.
Joomla 5 Tutorial for Beginners
In this tutorial, we explore the complete guide for Joomla 5 and learn the basics of Joomla 5 from the beginning to complete website development.
Why Joomla 5?
Joomla is a powerful and user-friendly Content Management System (CMS) trusted by millions worldwide. Joomla 5 offers a feature-rich admin dashboard, and interface, enhanced security features, and a focus on mobile responsiveness, making it an ideal platform for building modern and engaging websites. Joomla 5 provides an advanced-level website experience with Dark Mode in Administrator, Web Assets and Caching, Code Optimization, Media Management, and more. It is working with the latest version of PHP 8+.
Joomla 5 Basic Tutorial
This beginner-friendly tutorial will guide you through the following:
- Installation: You will learn how to install Joomla 5 on your web hosting platform. For more detailed information, read our tutorial: Mastering Joomla 5: A Beginner’s Guide. Here you will learn the Joomla 5 installation process step by step.
- Administrator: Get familiar with the Joomla 5 administrator dashboard, where you’ll manage your website’s content, menus, media, and users.
- Content Creation: Learn how to create content like articles, images, and banners to display on your website.
- Menu Management: Learn how to create menus, and submenus and make it easy for visitors to find what they want.
- Template Customization: Explore how to personalize the look and feel of your website using built-in templates or installing new ones.
So now we are starting from the second point because the first was already explained in our previous tutorial.
Joomla 5 Administrator
2. Administrator: The Joomla 5 administrator panel is similar to Joomla 4 only a few improvements have been added. You have to add an administrator after the domain, like below:
https://domainname.com/administrator/
The screenshot shows Content, Menus, Components, Users, System and Helps on the left sidebar.
On the right side, admin module blocks are showing as Site, System, and Notifications, created using the Quick Icon admin module. Other administrator modules are Logged-in Users, Sample Data, Latest Actions, etc., and you can add more admin modules here.
Joomla 5 Content Manager
3. Content Creation: In this tab, Joomla 5 offers Articles, Categories, Featured Articles, Field Groups, Media, Site Modules, and Administrator Modules. Currently, we are talking about the default or built-in features of Joomla 5.
Learn about: How to Create Contact Form in Joomla 5
Joomla 5 offers a variety of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, allowing you to create content visually, much like a word processor. This eliminates the need for manual coding and provides a familiar interface for crafting content. The default editors provide a good foundation; we can use third-party options that might offer additional functionalities.
In the above screenshot, the three option articles, categories, and featured articles belong to the same component, com_content. It allows the author to create posts, insert well-formatted data, and categories, or make them featured and displayed on the front end.
Fields and Fields Groups come with another extension called com_fields and you can create custom fields for content and categorise them by groups.
Media: This is also one of the default features of Joomla 5. It has improved from the old Joomla versions and offers adjustable thumbnails. you can create folders and upload images here.
Learn about: How to use Smart Search in Joomla 5
Joomla5 Modules
Site Module: In Joomla 5, there are only 3 site modules installed, like Breadcrumbs, Main Menu, and Login Form. We can install more modules or create new modules from default modules.
Administrator Modules: These are the modules that are only accessible in the administrator panel. and only the admin can manage it and create it. admin can assign locations for the admin dashboard.
Joomla 5 Menus
4. Menu Management: In this option, the admin can create a menu and menu items. The default is the Main Menu, and the menu item is Home. We can create a menu item type as shown in the screenshot.
5. Template Customization: Go to System-> Site Templates
In the Joomla template manager, we can install a new template or use an existing template and customize it according to your requirements. In the template folder, you can find the HTML folder and override layouts. We can override the layout of each component and module. We can modify CSS and JS to make changes to the template.
Learn about: Mastering RSS Newsfeeds in Joomla 5: A Comprehensive Tutorial