Creating Your Site

Joomla! is all about allowing you to create a site that matches your vision. The possibilities are limitless; this sample site will get you started.

There are a few things you should know to get you started.

Every Joomla! Web site has two parts: the Site (which is what your site visitors see) and the Administrator (which is where you will do a lot of the site management). You need to log in to the Administrator separately with the same username and password. There is a link to the administrator on the top menu that you will see when you log in.

You can edit articles in the Site by clicking on the edit icon. You can create a new article by clicking on the Create Article link in the top menu.

To do basic changes to the appearance your site click Home, Site Settings and Home, Template Settings.

To do more advanced things, like edit the contact form, manage users, or install a new template or extension, login to the Administrator.

Some quick tips for working in the Administrator

To change the image on all the pages: Go to the Module Manager and click on Image Module.
To edit the Side Module: Go to Extensions, Module Manager and click on Side Module.
To edit the Contact Form: Go to Components, Contacts. Click on Your Name.

Once you have your basic site you may want to install your own template (that controls the overall design of your site) and then, perhaps additional extensions.

There is a lot of help available for Joomla!. You can visit the Joomla! forums and the Joomla! documentation site to get started.

Change of host Sept 2023

In the begining of August 2023 I transfered my ivanhurst.me.uk sites, including this one from 123-reg to IONOS. It was meant to be a simple task. However, that was to to be the case. The reason for the move was primarily the hugh increase in price that 123-reg was applying regarding email boxes. Previously, the upto 500 of the boxes were included in the various hosting packages I had. Now they were going to charge for each mailbox based on size, and as far as I could make out, this was going to cost me nearly £2,000. This was not acceptable, and I did not get satisfactory answers from support. So I turned of all the auto renews and stated to move sites and domains accross to IONOS.

Travel data problems

This is where it starts to get a little technical.

The site is built on a content management system, CMS, using Joomla. Joomla is moving forward and version 3.10.?? is being discontinued. Future developments are for version 4.??

Similarly, PHP 7 is being replaced with PHP 8.

Part of the migration is relatively simple, I have already changed to a new template which works on the new platforms.

However, some of the helper applications, which work within Joomla are not yet ready.

Fabrik is one of those applications, if fact a significant 'Joomla Custom Website Application Builder'.

Site refresh Easter 2021

I decided to give the site a bit of a refresh over Easter 2021 and install a new template and some additional functions. One of the things I didn't like about the old site was the delay in text appearing which probably meant some people left before the content appeared. This has been corrected now.