Over the last couple of months since joomlaplazza has been online I have had many people asking the same questions over and over again. Most of these questions are from Joomla beginners or aspiring website owners who really don’t know a lot about Joomla or web development in general.  I understand that everybody can’t be an expert and I accept that everybody has to start somewhere. However it’s plainly obvious that a lot of people simply don’t read through the site properly and assume certain things when asking questions. Or they simply don’t even understand what Joomla is and how it works. It is often assumed that I created the template for this site myself and all the components within the site or that I created the software that allows user profiling in its entirety.  

This article will attempt to explain how I put joomlaplazza together and got it into its current state.  I will try to give you a general overview of the site and an extensive, although not exhaustive list of the modules, components, and modifications I used. One thing that I would like to make clear is that although Joomla is designed to be easy to install and use for non-programmers, when it comes to creating complex websites such as social networking sites its simply not always the case. In order to create joomlaplazza I had to use a vast array of different third party modules and components that were not really designed to work together and many of them have their own bugs and issues still to be worked out. I also made a few custom modifications to various components and modules used within joomlplazza to either correct minor bugs I found or correct conflicts between different components or even just to make the component do what I needed it to do. So therefore you must understand that if you know nothing about PHP and web programming then your at a disadvantage but don’t let that put you off as its still possible to create complex sites you will just have to work a bit harder and do a bit digging on forums and so forth to overcome your specific issues.