What is Joomla?

Sunday, 06 November 2005

General

Joomla is a GPL-ed Content Management System (CMS). It helps you create and maintain a structured, flexible website/portal, add and edit content, change the site look and feel, syndicate your news, and many more.

Joomla uses the PHP scripting language and stores most of its(and yours) information in a MySQL database.

Joomla does not require PHP or HTML knowledge. Usually all the configuration and content publishing is done from your Web browser.

Joomla features:

-flexible: it allows you to change the website look and feel to article-level granularity.

-extensible: get hundreds of addon components, modules or mambots to suit your particular needs. If you are a coder you can write your own Joomla extension.

-GPL-ed: you are provided the full source code, and granted the permission to change it to suit your needs.

-a customizable menu system. Joomla generates site menus based on the settings you choose and click.

-user registration

-public/priviledged content acces control

-site search

-Out-of-the-box SEO

-RSS syndication

-scheduled content article publishing/unpublishing

-per-article hit counter, "most popular" "latest additions" lists automatic display.

-template system, allowing you to change the whole site design with a click. Free templates are available for download.

-a bot system, which automatically alters content before it gets displayed. For example, a bot can "hide" all e-mail adresses or highight special words (such as php code or your company name) across your site

A few Joomla practical implementation examples:

a RSS agregator site
a community portal (with registration, private messaging, forum)
an ezine (eletronic magazine) with categorized articles, article archive, scheduled article publish/unpublish. These features are all built-in the Joomla core.
a media gallery site, featuring categorized media files: images, movies, Flash animations (a gallery component is required to achieve this functionality.)
a virtual shop.