Support

Support for the Joomla! CMS can be found on several places. The best place to start would be the Joomla! Official Documentation Wiki. Here you can help yourself to the information that is regularly published and updated as Joomla! develops. There is much more to come too!

Of course you should not forget the Help System of the CMS itself. On the topmenu in the Back-end Control panel you find the Help button which will provide you with lots of explanation on features.

Another great place would of course be the Forum . On the Joomla! Forum you can find help and support from Community members as well as from Joomla! Core members and Working Group members. The forum contains a lot of information, FAQ's, just about anything you are looking for in terms of support.

Two other resources for Support are the Joomla! Developer Site and the Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED). The Joomla! Developer Site provides lots of technical information for the experienced Developer as well as those new to Joomla! and development work in general. The JED whilst not a support site in the strictest sense has many of the Extensions that you will need as you develop your own Web site.

The Joomla! Developers and Bug Squad members are regularly posting their blog reports about several topics such as programming techniques and security issues.

Documentation

Joomla! Documentation can of course be found on the Joomla! Official Documentation Wiki. You can find information for beginners, installation, upgrade, Frequently Asked Questions, developer topics, and a lot more. The Documentation Team helps oversee the wiki but you are invited to contribute content, as well.

There are also books written about Joomla! You can find a listing of these books in the Joomla! Shop.

Got a question? With more than 210,000 members, the Joomla! Discussion Forums at forum.joomla.org are a great resource for both new and experienced users. Ask your toughest questions the community is waiting to see what you'll do with your Joomla! site.

Do you want to show off your new Joomla! Web site? Visit the Site Showcase section of our forum.

Do you want to contribute?

If you think working with Joomla is fun, wait until you start working on it. We're passionate about helping Joomla users become contributors. There are many ways you can help Joomla's development:

• Submit news about Joomla. We syndicate Joomla-related news on JoomlaConnect^TM. If you have Joomla news that you would like to share with the community, find out how to get connected here.
• Report bugs and request features in our trackers. Please read Reporting Bugs, for details on how we like our bug reports served up
• Submit patches for new and/or fixed behaviour. Please read Submitting Patches, for details on how to submit a patch.
• Join the developer forums and share your ideas for how to improve Joomla. We're always open to suggestions, although we're likely to be sceptical of large-scale suggestions without some code to back it up.
• Join any of the Joomla Working Groups and bring your personal expertise to the Joomla community. 

These are just a few ways you can contribute. See Contribute to Joomla for many more ways.

Here are some interesting facts about Joomla!

• Over 210,000 active registered Users on the Official Joomla! community forum and more on the many international community sites.
  • over 1,000,000 posts in over 200,000 topics
  • over 1,200 posts per day
  • growing at 150 new participants each day!
• 1168 Projects on the JoomlaCode (joomlacode.org ). All for open source addons by third party developers.
  • Well over 6,000,000 downloads of Joomla! since the migration to JoomlaCode in March 2007.
    
• Nearly 4,000 extensions for Joomla! have been registered on the Joomla! Extension Directory
• Joomla.org exceeds 2 TB of traffic per month!

Joomla! provides plenty of flexibility when displaying your Web content. Whether you are using Joomla! for a blog site, news or a Web site for a company, you'll find one or more content styles to showcase your information. You can also change the style of content dynamically depending on your preferences. Joomla! calls how a page is laid out a layout. Use the guide below to understand which layouts are available and how you might use them.

Content

Joomla! makes it extremely easy to add and display content. All content is placed where your mainbody tag in your template is located. There are three main types of layouts available in Joomla! and all of them can be customised via parameters. The display and parameters are set in the Menu Item used to display the content your working on. You create these layouts by creating a Menu Item and choosing how you want the content to display.

Blog Layout

Blog layout will show a listing of all Articles of the selected blog type (Section or Category) in the mainbody position of your template. It will give you the standard title, and Intro of each Article in that particular Category and/or Section. You can customise this layout via the use of the Preferences and Parameters, (See Article Parameters) this is done from the Menu not the Section Manager!

Blog Archive Layout

A Blog Archive layout will give you a similar output of Articles as the normal Blog Display but will add, at the top, two drop down lists for month and year plus a search button to allow Users to search for all Archived Articles from a specific month and year.

List Layout

Table layout will simply give you a tabular list of all the titles in that particular Section or Category. No Intro text will be displayed just the titles. You can set how many titles will be displayed in this table by Parameters. The table layout will also provide a filter Section so that Users can reorder, filter, and set how many titles are listed on a single page (up to 50)

Wrapper

Wrappers allow you to place stand alone applications and Third Party Web sites inside your Joomla! site. The content within a Wrapper appears within the primary content area defined by the "mainbody" tag and allows you to display their content as a part of your own site. A Wrapper will place an IFRAME into the content Section of your Web site and wrap your standard template navigation around it so it appears in the same way an Article would.

Content Parameters

The parameters for each layout type can be found on the right hand side of the editor boxes in the Menu Item configuration screen. The parameters available depend largely on what kind of layout you are configuring.