An Introduction to the User Interface of Joomla! 1.7 Backend Administration Panel

Joomla! has become the content management system of choice by webmasters, entrepreneurs, as well as big businesses alike. The reason for the popularity of Joomla! is multifaceted and is inherent in its ease of use, modularity, and its open-source nature. These days, more and more people are turning to content management systems in an effort to avoid the expensive software as well as skills needed for web development. Since an open source content management system is free and does not entail uploading files using an FTP manager, it has become very attractive in recent years for the purpose of developing and managing an online presence. However, one of the greatest hurdles in building a website around Joomla! or migrating to the Joomla! platform is that one needs to be aware of the different elements present in the system before one can start feeling comfortable with administration. The purpose of this article is to familiarize the reader with the administration interface of the Joomla! content management system so that subsequent maintenance with this CMS will be easy and hasslefree. Keeping in mind that it may not be easy for the reader to read through the entire article in detail, we have organized it by presenting the main user interface elements of Joomla! 1.7 in ordered bulleted lists.

The Joomla! 1.7 Administration Panel

Upon logging into the Joomla! administration control panel, you will see a drop-down menu namely "Quick Icons" which contains graphical links to the 12 most commonly used functions in Joomla!. These include "Add New Article", "Article Manager", "Category Manager", "Media Manager", "Menu Manager", "User Manager", "Module Manager", "Extension Manager", "Language Manager", "Global Configuration", "Template Manager", and "Edit Profile". The main menu of the Joomla! 1.7 administration panel contains 7 menu items namely "Site", "Users", "Menus", "Content", "Components", "Extensions", and "Help". These menu items are discussed below.

The "Site" menu item 

Pointing at the "Site" menu item opens up a drop-down menu which contains 6 items namely "Control Panel", "My Profile", "Global Configuration","Maintenance", "System Information", and "Logout". Clicking on "Control Panel" will take you to the same screen that you see when you log into the administration panel for the first time. The "My Profile" item takes you to a page where you can change your Joomla! administration panel login name and password as well as your e-mail address. You can also change the backend template style and language along with the frontend language and time zone.  

The "Global Configuration" item takes you to a page which has four sections namely 'Site', 'System', 'Server', and 'Permissions'. The 'Site' section allows you to change your site name under Site Settings subsection. This corresponds to editing the administration title in joomla 1.7. You can also choose whether your site is online or off-line along with a custom tailored offline message. Under Default Editor, a choice of two editors is available (which are used for editing the content you create in Joomla!) namely TinyMCE and CodeMirror. You can also choose the default access level, i.e. public registered etc. Furthermore, there are also options for the default list limit, the default feed limit, as well as the feed e-mail. Under the Metadata Settings subsection, you can choose the default meta-description, keywords, and content rights for your website. There is also an option that lets you choose whether to show the author meta-tag or not. Then on the right, there is the SEO Settings subsection which controls the appearance of the URLs in your website and is pretty much self-explanatory. Under that, there is a subsection entitled Cookie Settings. 

The "System" section has for subsections entitled System Settings, Debug Settings, Cache Settings, and Session Settings. The Cache Settings subsection allows you to turn caching on or off and also lets you specify the cache time. This is especially useful when you don't update the pages on your site quite often and would want quick loading of your pages to the end-user if he returns to your site within the specified cache time. The Sessions Settings subsection allows you to set the session lifetime, that is the amount of time after which the user is logged out of the administration panel automatically. This is useful if you want to avoid logging back into the system over and over again. 

The "Server" section contains five subsections namely Server Settings, Location Settings, FTP Settings, Database Settings, and Mail settings. The Server Settings subsection allows you to specify the path to temp folder, to enable or disable gzip page compression, to specify error reporting options, as well as force SSL over the entire site or the administrator side only. The Location Settings subsection allows you to specify the server time zone based on your specific location. The FTP Settings subsection allows you to enable or disable FTP and to specify FTP parameters such as host, port, username, password, as well as FTP root. The Database Settings subsection allows you to select the type of database along with the host, username, database username, and database tables prefix. The Mail Settings subsection allow you to specify the type of your preferred mailer (PHP Mail, Sendmail, or SMTP) as well as many other parameters for sending and receiving e-mail. Finally, the "Permissions" section allows you to specify the permissions for a variety of parent and child user groups. 

The "Users" menu item 

Pointing at the "Users" menu item opens up a drop-down menu which contains 4 items namely "User Manager", "Groups", "Access Levels", and "Mass Mail Users". Each of the first three menu items mentioned above when hovered upon opens up a submenu with a single menu item in it namely 'Add New User', 'Add New Group', and 'Add New Access Level'. The function of these is to avoid the need of clicking on the respective items and then clicking on the 'New' button. Clicking on any of the three items "User Manager", "Groups", or "Access Levels" takes you to a screen having three tabs at the top which correspond to clicking on these individual items respectively. The 'Users' tab allows you to view a list of users registered on your website. It has nine columns namely Name, User Name, Enabled, Activated, Using Groups, E-mail, Last Visit Date, Registration Date, and ID which are all sortable. The User Groups lists all the user groups present in your website. Clicking on each group takes you to a page that allows you to change the Group Title as well as the Group Parent. The Viewing Access Levels tab presents a list of four Access levels which are present by default in Joomla!. These include Customer Access Level, Public, Registered, and Special. Clicking on each of these access level takes you to a page that allows you to change the Level Title as well as the user groups having Viewing Access for that particular Access Level. The last item "Mass Mail Users" takes you to a screen that allows you to send bulk e-mail to one or more groups.

The "Menus" menu item 

Pointing at the "Menus" menu item opens up a drop-down menu which contains a link to the "Menu Manager" as well as a link to each of the menus created using the Menu Manager. Each created menu that appears below the "Menu Manager" also shows a link to "Add New Menu Item" when pointed at it. This is very handy and can be used to easily add a new menu item to an existing menu. Clicking on the "Menu Manager" takes you to a screen that has two tabs at the top namely 'Menus', and 'Menu Items'. By default, the 'Menus' screen shows up when the "Menu Manager" is clicked. The screen shows the Title of the created menus, the Number of Menu Items in each menu along with the number of Published, Unpublished, and Trashed menu items that are all clickable. If any of these numbers is clicked, it takes you to the menu items present within that particular menu and the view switches to the "Menu Items" tab. This screen also has a Filter that allows you to search for a particular menu item. Furthermore, there are five drop-down boxes that let you filter menu items by a specific menu, by the number of levels of menu item has, by status i.e. published unpublished trashed etc., by Access i.e. public registered special etc., and by any particular language among the different languages installed in your website. Coming back to the "Menus" tab, there is also a column entitled Modules Linked to the Menu which contains a link to the configuration window of the module that is linked to that menu. At the end, there is the ID column which shows the identification number of a particular menu. Both the Title column and the ID column are sortable.

The "Content" menu item 

When pointed at the "Content" menu item, a drop-down menu appears that contains four items namely "Article Manager", "Category Manager", "Featured Articles", and "Media Manager". Each of the first two items, when pointed at, show a handy link namely "Add New Article", and "Add New Category". The "Featured Articles" item shows articles that have been marked as featured by the user. The "Media Manager" item takes you to a screen that has two tabs at the top namely 'Thumbnail View', and 'Detail View'. Both can be used to add a variety of media such as pictures, videos etc inside articles showing up in the different pages of your website. 

Clicking on any one of the items "Article Manager", "Category Manager", and "Featured Articles", takes you to a screen that has three tabs at the top namely "Articles", "Categories", and "Featured Articles". The screen that appears by clicking on each of these three tabs is the same that can be accessed by clicking on the three items mentioned above. Each of the above-mentioned three tabs has a filter that can be used to search for content by keyword. Using drop-down menus, the articles section can be filtered by their "Status", "Category", "Access Level", "Author", and "Language". The categories section can be filtered by "Max Levels", "Status", "Access", and "Language" using drop-down menus. The "Featured Articles" has only three drop-down menus that can be used to filter featured articles, i.e. "Status", "Access", and "Language". In order to delete one or more articles, categories, or featured articles, you need to select them and click on the Trash button that appears at position number eight among the 10 buttons at the top right.

The "Components" menu item 

The drop-down menu that appears after hovering the mouse at the "Components" menu item contains links to seven components that are built into the Joomla! 1.7 content management system by default. These include "Banners", "Contacts", "Messaging", "Newsfeeds", "Redirect", "Search", and "Weblinks". Hovering the mouse at the "Banners" item opens up another menu that has four links namely "Banners", "Categories", "Clients", and "Tracks". These four links are analogous to the four tabs that appear when you actually click at the "Banners" item. The banners tab lets you toggle the status of banners from published to unpublished and vice versa, along with an option to order the banners. It also shows the number of impressions (i.e. the number of times a banner is shown) as well as the number of clicks on each banner. Aside from a search filter, banners can also be filtered by Status, Client, Category, and Language. The Categories tab lets you manipulate the defined categories. The Clients tab obviously shows you the clients being used, i.e. the Joomla! platform. The Tracks tab can be used to monitor the performance of banners between a Begin date and a End date. 

The Contacts component contains links to two functions namely Contacts and Categories that also appeared as tabbed functions when the Contacts component itself is clicked. The Contacts are sorted by Categories in order to make it easy to find one or more contacts. Not only you can publish and unpublish individual contacts but you can also unpublish entire categories. The Messages component takes you to a screen with two tabs namely "New Private Message" and "Messages". The former can be used to send a new private message to one or more individual users who have registered at your website, whereas the latter lets you track the messages that you have sent or received so far. The "Newsfeeds" component can be used to display news from one or more categories on one or more pages of your site. Analogous to the "newsfeeds" component is the news module that can be used to display news on a section of a page instead of the whole page. The "Weblinks" component opens up two links when hovered upon namely "Links" and "Categories". Both these links also appear as tabs when the "Weblinks" component is clicked. The links can be sorted by categories and one or more links or entire link categories can be published or unpublished.

The "Extensions" menu item

The Extensions menu item, when pointed at, displays a drop-down menu that has 5 subitems in it. These include "Extension Manager", "Module Manager", "Plug-in Manager", "Template Manager", and "Language Manager". Clicking on the "Extension Manager" displays a screen entitled "Extension Manager: Install". The screen has five tabs namely Install, Update, Manage, Discover, and Warnings. By default, the Install screen displays which shows three headers in the top to bottom order namely Upload Package File, Install from Directory, and Install from URL. These are different ways of installing a new extension in Joomla! 1.7. The Upload Package File lets you install a new extension from a compressed file with the extension.zip. The Install from Directory option allows you to upload a folder (that contains files for the new extension to be installed) to a particular directory on your website and then click on the Install button to have the extension installed. Similarly the Install from URL option allows you to install an extension directly from a URL that can be on your own site or on another site and which again contains a compressed file with extension.zip.

The Update tab allows you to upgrade to the latest version of the Joomla! content management system as well as any other extension that has been developed using a system integration with Joomla!. The Manage tab allows you to enable/disable or uninstall an extension. There seems to be a bug in the Joomla! 1.7 CMS which is that you cannot uninstall a template from the Template Manager, instead you have to uninstall it using the Manage tab. The Manage tab can be used to uninstall an extension of type Component, File, Language, Library, Module, Plugin, and Template. The Joomla! 1.7 developers were aware of the fact that sometimes you may not be able to install an extension using the normal installation process, i.e. it may give some errors and would not install. Also, your web hosting server environment may not allow you to upload files greater than a certain size using the web interface of Joomla! 1.7. The Discover tab was incorporated specifically for this purpose. It allows you to discover and integrate extensions into the Joomla! 1.7 installation that you have uploaded manually to your FTP server. Finally, the Warnings tab displays the different errors generated during your installation of one or more extensions.

Clicking on Module Manager takes you to a screen entitled "Module Manager: Modules". Here you can not only enable/disable a specific module but you can also set a particular ordering for modules of the same Type. Modules are smaller elements or blocks (also referred to as boxes) that can be displayed in a variety of positions on your website. The positions for modules of different Type are defined in the file index.php for a particular Template. Since modules are analogous to the positions, each menu that you define using the Menu Manager: Menus must be linked to at least one module in order for that menu to be displayed in that particular position. If the menu is not linked to any module, it will not display. The Plug-in Manager displays not only those plug-ins that come installed with the Joomla! 1.7 content management system, but also the custom plug-ins that have been installed by the user. Plug-ins are not displayed on the front end of the Joomla! 1.7 website, instead they work behind the scenes to achieve a particular functionality. For example, the built-in search function that comes with the Joomla! installation is a plug-in. Like modules, plug-ins can also be enabled/disabled as well as ordered.

Clicking on the Template Manager takes you to a screen with two tabs namely "Styles", and "Templates". The styles tab shows the Administrator as well as Site templates. The Administrative templates are applicable only to the administration panel side, whereas the Site templates apply to the live front end website. From the Administrator as well as Site templates each, one template can be declared to be the Default template. The chosen default templates define the appearance of the administrative side as well as the front end site. The Templates tab gives detailed information about a particular template, which includes a snapshot of the template, the version number of the template, the author etc. The Language manager lets you choose the default language for the Installed-Site, the Installed-Administrator, as well as the Content. The default language is usually English unless you have installed other languages into the Joomla! 1.7 content management system.

The "Help" menu item

The Help menu item is very much self-explanatory. It contains four links namely "Joomla! Help", "Support Forum", "Documentation Wiki", and "Useful Joomla! links". The Joomla! help link takes you to a screen that shows you the installed Joomla! help documentation. This is very much organized and can not only be searched but can also be used to know about a particular functionality using the Alphabetical Index. With each link, there is an icon showing whether that particular piece of information relates to the Joomla! 1.6 CMS or the latest Joomla! 1.7 CMS. Clicking on the Support Forum takes you to the address "http://forum.joomla.org/", which nowadays is giving a Not Acceptable error with details saying something like "an appropriate representation of the requested resource could not be found on this server". Clicking on the Documentation Wiki takes you to the web address "http://docs.joomla.org/", which is your one-stop resource for the Joomla! Official Documentation. The Useful Joomla! Links, when pointed at, opens up a menu that has 7 links in it. The most important of these is "Joomla! Extensions" which refers to the address "http://extensions.joomla.org/". This is your one-stop resource to finding new extensions that can be used to add new functionality to the Joomla! 1.7 content management system. A great majority of these extensions is free, where the developer simply asks you for a back link or something similar. However there is also a certain percentage which is commercial and you need to pay a license fee in order to use that particular extension in your own Joomla! 1.7 environment.

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