You indeed can change the Menu Item's Type to whatever you want, even after they have been created.

If, for instance, you want to change the Blog Section of a Menu link, go to the Control Panel->Menus Menu->[menuname]->Menu Item Manager and edit the Menu Item. Select the Change Type button and choose the new style of Menu Item Type from the available list. Thereafter, alter the Details and Parameters to reconfigure the display for the new selection as you require it.

Installing of Joomla! 1.5 is pretty easy. We assume you have set-up your Web site, and it is accessible with your browser.

Download Joomla! 1.5, unzip it and upload/copy the files into the directory you Web site points to, fire up your browser and enter your Web site address and the installation will start.

For full details on the installation processes check out the Installation Manual on the Joomla! Help Site where you will also find download instructions for a PDF version too.

Yes it can! This is a significant security improvement.

The safe mode limits PHP to be able to perfom actions only on files/folders who's owner is the same as PHP is currently using (this is usually 'apache'). As files normally are created either by the Joomla! application or by FTP access, the combination of PHP file actions and the FTP Layer allows Joomla! to operate in PHP Safe Mode.

Joomla! runs on the PHP pre-processor. PHP comes in many flavours, for a lot of operating systems. Beside PHP you will need a Web server. Joomla! is optimized for the Apache Web server, but it can run on different Web servers like Microsoft IIS it just requires additional configuration of PHP and MySQL. Joomla! also depends on a database, for this currently you can only use MySQL.

• Apache 1.x or 2.x
• PHP 4.3 or up
• MySQL 3.23 or up

The FTP Layer allows file operations (such as installing Extensions or updating the main configuration file) without having to make all the folders and files writable. This has been an issue on Linux and other Unix based platforms in respect of file permissions. This makes the site admin's life a lot easier and increases security of the site.

You can check the write status of relevent folders by going to ''Help->System Info" and then in the sub-menu to "Directory Permissions". With the FTP Layer enabled even if all directories are red, Joomla! will operate smoothly.

NOTE: the FTP layer is not required on a Windows host/server.

Well... how about never needing to mess with encoding settings again?

Ever needed to display several languages on one page or site and something always came up in Giberish?

With utf-8 (a variant of Unicode) glyphs (character forms) of basically all languages can be displayed with one single encoding setting.