Day 04- Introduction To Joomla Administration Control Panel!

Welcome to the Day 4 of your Joomla Website Setup. Today I am gonna introduce you to Joomla administration control panel. Yesterday I wrote about the “Joomla Installation”.Some of the things are pretty simple in Joomla World and some complicated too. To access the administration control panel, you need to login to Joomla Back end.

 

Logging In To Joomla Back End

Its quite simple. We have setup our website as: http://www.worldiswelcome.com/experiment, or whatever be your domain. To login to the back end enter the url as below:

http://www.worldiswelcome.com/experiment/administrator

 

This takes you to the back end administration login screen. The screen looks like as below:

Here initially user name is: admin

and Password is whatever you kept it: some_very_secure_words

 

Enter the credentials and press the button Login. This takes you to Joomla Administration Control Panel. The control panel looks as below.

 

Otherwise you can enter control panel by pointing your mouse to “Site”, the very first menu in Top Menus and then clicking on “Control Panel”. This picture is shown as below:
 

Checking The Version of Joomla Installation

See at the top right corner of the screen. You will see something like 1.5.8 etc. That is the version of Joomla installed on your server. This is shown as in picture below:

 

Introduction To Control Panel Buttons

In the control panel, you see 10 Big Sized Buttons on the left side. Now there is a brief description about each of these elements of Control Panel. The components are:

1. Add New Article
2. Article Manager
3. Front Page Manager
4. Section Manager
5. Category Manager
6. Media Manager
7. Menu Manager
8. Language Manager
9. User Manager
10. Global Configuration

 

All of the above 10 components are described one by one as below. All of the 10 components are also referred to as menu buttons.

 

Add New Article

This menu button takes you to the page where you can write an article for your website. In Joomla terminology an article and content are synonymous. This menu helps you to configure your article fully.

 

Article Manager

This menu button takes you to article manager screen. There you can do several operations like adding, editing, publishing, archiving, unarchiving etc. of your articles. Various other operations are also possible. I’ll discuss these things in the days to come.

 

Front Page Manager

This menu button takes you to Front Page Manager screen. Here you can decide what to put on front page of website and what not.

 

Section Manager

This menu button takes you to Section Manager. The Section is the top level of groups available in core Joomla. Section contains categories. The articles are arranged in categories. Here you can manager the sections of articles.

 

Category Manager

This menu button will take you to Category Manager. Here you manage the categories. And can arrange and re-arrange the categories, copy, move operations on categories.

 

Media Manager

This menu button takes you to Media Manager. There you can upload the media files and arrange those as per your needs.

 

Menu Manager

This menu button will take you to Menu Manager. Here you can do various operations related with your Joomla Menus.

 

Language Manager

This menu button takes you to Language Manger. Here you can manage languages if you are using multilingual capabilities of Joomla.

 

User Manager

This menu button will take you to User Manger. Here you can manger your website users.

 

Global Configuration

This menu button takes you to Global Configuration. Here you can manage various parameters which affect Joomla Setup globally.

 

 

The Right Side of Control Panel

On the right side of the control panel you see 5-6 links depending upon your installation and configuration. The main of this side is to give you quick view of your site. These are:

1. Logged in Users
2. Popular
3. Recent Added Articles
4. Menu Stats

 

Logged in Users

Clicking on this link shows you the users which are logged into your Joomla site. Both front end and back end logged in users are included.

Popular

This link shows you the 10 most popular articles of your site based upon the number of hits(No. ff times an article is seen)

 

Recent Added Articles

This link shows 10 recently added articles.

 

Menu Stats

This link shows menu item statistics. It shows which menu has how many number of menu items.

 

All of the above menu items deserve full page articles per item. I’ll be introducing you to all of those one by one in the days to come. In day 5, I am gonna discuss top menu items. Remember to come back and grab your tutorial session.