What is Joomla?

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Joomla! is a free open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web Application Development framework. The system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization. Joomla is licensed under the GPL, and is the result of a fork of Mambo. It is written in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database system to store information.

Benefits of Joomla

Joomla is one of the most powerful Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Best of all it is simple to manage and reliable.

Here are just some of the ways people use Joomla:

• Corporate websites or portals
• Small business websites
• Non-profit and organizational websites
• Government applications
• Corporate intranets and extranets
• School and church websites
• Personal or family homepages
• Community-based portals
• Magazines and newspapers
• Online commerce

The possibilities are endless! Joomla can be used to easily manage every aspect of your website, from adding content and images to updating a product catalog or taking online reservations.

Easy Management

Once Joomla is installed, configured, and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go.

Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla site. Via a simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add news items, manage staff pages, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your site.

Customizing Joomla to Meet Your Specific Needs

Joomla does a great job of managing the content of your website. But its true power lies in the framework that makes it possible to customize your website with add-ons and extensions. Here are just a few examples of the hundreds of options available:

• Google Adsense
• Weather Reporting Services
• Photos and multimedia galleries
• Ecommerce and shopping carts
• Forums and chat software
• Calendars
• Games
• Google Maps
• RSS outgoing and incoming feeds
• Glossaries and Dictionaries
• Email newsletters
• Surveys
• Data collection and reporting tools
• Banner advertising systems
• Subscription services
• and many, many more!

Joomla is well supported by a community of developers and service providers. Most web hosting service providers support Joomla installations. In essence, Joomla is fast growing with a great support structure.

One of the best things about Joomla! is how easy it is to add or modify content, including images and multimedia, and organizing and managing important data.

The real power of Joomla is found in the application architecture that enables thousands of developers around the world to create powerful add-ons and extensions to this powerful content management system Here is a brief list of some of these extensions. For a comprehensive list visit the Joomla Extensions directory

• Dynamic form builders
• Image and multimedia galleries
• E-commerce and shopping cart engines
• Forums and chat software
• Calendars
• Blogging software
• Email newsletters
• Data collection and reporting tools
• Banner advertising systems
• Subscription services

Below is a list of some other features and benefits of Joomla CMS.

• Database driven site engines- helps separate content from code and design.
• Content sections fully editable and manageable - you dont need to be a developer to add content.
• Article content can be added to by contributing authors
• Fully customizable layouts - there are thousands of templates to choose from so you can change the look and feel of your site without affecting the main content
• Browser upload of images to your own library for use anywhere in the site
• Dynamic Forum/Poll/Voting booth for on-the-spot results
• Tons of third party extension eg subscription site, alternative editors
• Runs on Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, MacOSX server, Solaris and AIX

Extensive Administration:

• Change order of objects including news, FAQs, articles etc.
• Random Newsflash generator
• User manager - allow or disallow user registrations
• Menu manager helps make your site navigation a breeze.
• Restricted content - you control access to articles for eg public or registered
• Remote author submission module for News, Articles, FAQs and Links
• Content hierarchy - as many sections, categories and articles as you want
• Image library - store your multi-media content online for easy use
• Automatic Path-Finder. Place a picture and let Joomla! fix the link
• News feed manager. Choose from news feeds from around the world
• Archive manager. Put your old articles into cold storage rather than throw them out
• Email-a-friend, PDF and Print-format for every story and article
• In-line Text editor for easy article writing.
• Polls/Surveys - You can put a different ones on various pages
• Template Manager. Download templates and implement them quickly
• Layout preview. See how it looks before going live

Joomla is awarded as Content Management System (CMS) that aids the establishment of hefty websites and other internet online applications. Joomla acts as Open Source solution, which is freely usable to anybody. More than 50,0000 registered members made Joomla the best and most skilled operating system for building ascendable websites.

Joomla applications are used and accessed worldwide from mere personal and subjective homepages to intricate corporal web applications. People use it as website for small to large-scale businesses, non-profit organizations, government applications, for school and church, newspaper and magazines. Users also make this as their computer homepage, community-based portals, even as online commerce, plus a lot more possible and boundless functions. Joomla simplified the use and management of your website. User may add image or context, catalogs and almost everything. Attractively designed and highly flexible to utilize back-end administration region where in you can manage every aspect of your website’s content, users, components, admins and modules. Its capability to integrate a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) allows editing text, but more on formatting it. Samples are styles, list, colors, links and more. 100% template placed, implying it’s light to make your individual layouts and the unified template switcher entails user can promptly modify between layouts to equate them. There’s a free ‘Template Creator’ module that brings you through procedure of producing a template step-by-step.

The benefits of Joomla cater programmers and even non-programmers. Even newbies will have no hassle making the software work. You can access a demo for basic installation. And there is ample support for everyone. Friendly and supportive members are even there to give users a hand. Joomla made editing content and adding inputs such as multimedia and images as easy as one, two, three. Other joomla users are developing Joomla components and modules, which can be set up on your website to giving new functionality like glossaries, photo galleries, online shops and discussion forums, plus so on and so forth. Who ever have knowledge in basic computer processing skills will easily learn how to manage Joomla.

To simplify Joomla?s greater benefits, here are few samples:

• It is 101% FREE.
• It has awesome functionality with its hundreds of add-ons. Users may modify source code to enhance your own sites.
• It’s always growing because it is an open source.
• It has ample technical support.
• It has supportive members that can help you anytime
• It can be personalized and privatized.
• It has a forum site where members can freely interact.

The official website for Joomla is http://www.joomla.org. Learn, enjoy and have fun. Meet and greet new friends. Enhance your business capabilities, impress your customers and have greater input. Let your organization be known, join at joomla, its whole world success can be in your own fingertips. There is a lot more in stored, with its cutting edge modifications and technology. With Joomla, nothing seems to be impossible.