Official Joomla Documentation

The home site for official Joomla Documentation is docs.joomla.org.  This WikiMedia based site is full of great resources on all kinds of things!  Spend some time wandering aroung there and you will definately learn something new, no matter what your experience level is.

The Official Joomla Installation Guide

If you want to install Joomla manually on a file server, you'll need some detailed, step by step instructions.  The best place to start is the official Joomla Installation Manual.

You can read the installation manual online, or download it directly from this link.

Some Recommended Resources

The Absolute Beginners Guide to Joomla

Be sure to visit the Absolute Beginner's Guide here:  http://docs.joomla.org/Beginners

If you do nothing else, take time to complete the Joomla! v 1.5 Quick Start Guide Scribd, written by Kevin Hayne. As you read the guide, walk through the video accompaniment created by Michael Casha. This is a well developed and efficient training guide and video set.

The Visual Guide to Joomla 1.5

Let me recommend the Visual Guide to Joomla 1.5.  This free 59 page pdf has the subtitle "Learn Joomla Fast."  Full of screen shots and excellent, bite size chapters and lessons, this is a great way to get started with Joomla.

Download the Visual Guide to Joomla here

The Rough Guide to Joomla 1.5

Jason Gallagher has written a good intro guide to using Joomla 1.5, and published it as a "rough guide."   This simple 18 page pdf is well worth downloading and reading.

Download the rough guide to Joomla 1.5. here.   Visit Jason's site for other helpful resources.

Independently Written Joomla Books

In addition to this, there are a number of books that are commercially available (and many are downloadable as e-books).  Although they vary in quality and in audience, it is great to have a nice book to look at.

Here are some links to these books in my Links Directory.

Like any area of interest, Joomla has it's own "lingo."   And, knowing how to understand the terms used in Jooma can be a big help.  So, get fluent in "Joomla!"    Here is a basic list of frequently used Joomla terms to help you get some basic understanding.

Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that helps build powerful websites and other online applications.

As an Open Source solution that is freely available to everybody. Joomla benefits from a huge development and user community (over 140,000 registered users at forum.joomla.org !) - making it the most versatile platform for building scalable websites.

This article is coming soon.

In the meanwhile, visit this link for a great introduction to why you should use Joomla.

Joomla! is used all over the world to power everything from simple, personal homepages to complex corporate web applications.  It can be used to create a blog site, a hobby site, a website for a school or a church or a club, or to build a community around a topic.

It's really quite verstile, and it all depends on how you configure it.  Here are just some of the ways people use it.

The question was:

I'm novice in Joomla and I need clarification about the terminology. For example some extensions have different types, such as component, plugin, module, language. I don’t actually understand, what type of extension I have to download and install.

I need to install FacileForms, but I’m not sure, what type of extension I have to download, FacileForms Component, FacileForms Mambot or FacileForms Module.

Any stuff (explanations, links, references) will be greatly appreciated.

So, I tried to give my explanation:

Understanding how to organize your content in Joomla is a key skill.  Sure, you could lump it all together (and that's fine if you have a small site), but generally you will want to use Joomla's Sections and Categories structure to break your content in to a more managable structure.