The Award Winning Joomla! CMS

The basic idea of Joomla (or any web content management system for that matter) is that a non-technical person often needs to be able to keep their own website up-to-date without having to call on a web developer to make changes every time. Of course there are some things that can only be done by a web developer, but for simpler tasks such as changing the wording of a paragraph, it is an unnecessary burden and expense for both parties if you have to get a developer to make the changes.

Joomla therefore attempts to separate the technical tasks from the non-technical by providing tools to help a non-technical person manage and organize the content of their website. It also provides additional tools which help to add more functionality to a site (by installing ready-made components, for example to add a guestbook, forum, events calendar, etc).

Once installed, the website administrator can login to the backend administration console and set up sections, categories, content items, polls and much more; administrating the entire frontend of the website from a point and click interface. When new content is created, a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor allows for simple edits without the knowledge of HTML. While it is not mandatory the user have knowledge of HTML, it is recommended to engage in a few HTML primers in the event that something needs to be edited on a more custom level. The Joomla community forums are available with thousands of programmers and designers to help new and advanced users when possible.

Joomla is an, open source content management system written in PHP for publishing and managing content on the web and intranets using an MySQL database. Joomla includes features such as page caching to improve performance, web indexing, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, newsflashes, blogs, forums, polls, calendars, website searching, and language internationalization.

The name is a phonetic spelling of the Swahili word "jumla" meaning "all together" or "as a whole". It was chosen to reflect the commitment of the development team and community to the project. The first release of Joomla (Joomla 1.0.0) was announced on September 16, 2005. This was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 combined with other bug and moderate-level security fixes. In the project's roadmap, the core developers say Joomla! 2.0 will be a completely re-written code base built with PHP 5.

The project site can be found at www.joomla.org.

Joomla! is released under the GNU General Public License.

Joomla! Features: 

• Completely database driven site engines
• News, products or services sections fully editable and manageable
• Topics sections can be added to by contributing authors
• Fully customizable layouts including left, center and right menu boxes
• Browser upload of images to your own library for use anywhere in the site
• Dynamic Forum/Poll/Voting booth for on-the-spot results
• Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOSX server, Solaris and AIX 

Extensive Administration: 

• Change order of objects including news, FAQs, articles etc.
• Random Newsflash generator
• Remote author submission module for News, Articles, FAQs and Links
• Object hierarchy - as many sections, departments, divisions and pages as you want
• Image library - store all your PNGs, PDFs, DOCs, XLSs, GIFs and JPEGs online for easy use
• Automatic Path-Finder. Place a picture and let Joomla! fix the link
• News feed manager. Choose from over 360 news feeds from around the world
• Archive manager. Put your old articles into cold storage rather than throw them out
• Email-a-friend and Print-format for every story and article
• In-line Text editor similar to Word Pad
• User editable look and feel
• Polls/Surveys - Now put a different one on each page
• Custom Page Modules. Download custom page modules to spice up your site
• Template Manager.
• Layout preview. See how it looks before going live
• Banner manager.