Joomla!® 24-Hour Trainer

IDENTIFYING IMPORTANT FUNCTIONALITY

Now that you have your site map in place, it's time to think about special functionality that might be required to build this site.

Given the emphasis on events at the school, a calendar would be a logical addition to this site. Online calendars enable the administrator to add dates, times, and locations of events to a screen that displays the information in the form of a printed calendar, generally one month at a time, although this is configurable.

This type of functionality is great if several events are displayed each month. However, if only a handful of events occur all year, a monthly calendar wouldn't be appropriate; it would look like someone weren't updating the website in a timely manner, or give the impression that not much were happening. In other words, not all events warrant the use of a calendar. In some cases, a simple page that covers the annual retreat or the monthly meeting might be appropriate. For our example, however, several events are typically happening each week, so a calendar is a good choice.

The calendar feature is not included with Joomla, but it can be downloaded as an extension. An extension is a program that runs within Joomla and enhances Joomla's capabilities. I'll cover extensions more fully in coming lessons. For example, another item that doesn't come with Joomla but may be useful for our example site is an image gallery, which contains small images (called thumbnails) that site visitors can click to view ...