Demaestro - 7:45 pm on Sep 18, 2012 (gmt 0)

My biggest issue with Joomla has been it's utter lack of documentation. However I have been hammering on it for a while and I have come to love the beast I was forced to learn.

***Modules***
Modules are basically widgets. You can make a module that shows things like upcoming news, or featured events, or "quick links". With any module you have the option to place it on all pages, or a selection of pages.

If you install Jumi then you can make a module and point it to a php script which you can make do anything you want. Most components come with a couple modules, but you can always make custom ones. (E.g. a event component usually comes with a "upcoming events" module. But if you don't like it you can create a module and code it to output events using logic and SQL of your own choosing.

***Menus***
Menus are simply navigation items. In your template you can define what position in the template a menu will display, when you add a menu you define what content type you are linking to. Your standard menu will point to an article (AKA webpage). When you create a menu item you must first select the menu type.

A menu of type "single article" will require you to select which article you are linking to.

A menu type of "Upcoming events" will display upcoming events and the "view" for this will come from the event component.

A menu type of "list contacts" will show a listing of contacts from the contact component and the "view" method for this will come from the contacts component.

Anytime you want to override a defaut view you can create an overriding template. There is lots of documentation on this.


***Categories ***
Categories I almost never use. The only time I use them is when I am trying to restrict user workflow. Eg userA can edit a collection of pages (1,2 and 3). userB can edit a different collection of pages (4,5 and 6) I use a separate category for each of the page groups then assign edit permissions based on categories. It is the only use I have found for them but I can see why some site structures would make use of them.

I will echo CAT... Joomla is not dieing, they just need to work on documentation but it is widely adopted and supported.

If you have specific questions I will try to help you.