What Is Joomla?
Joomla, called the best CMS (Contact Management System) in the world, is preferred by tens of thousands of website administrators, the world over. The main reason for this stems from the ease of set-up and updating mainly by the very people that work on the sites daily.
New Frontier
Joomla is a new frontier for website owners as well as web design professionals and is one of the hottest content management systems for website design in existence today. The beauty of Joomla can be seen in so many different factors and most of these are easily learned and managed by the website owner in very little time!
Website Administrator Bliss
From easy installation to slick backend administration, Joomla is taking the guesswork out of website development and editing. As soon as the program is installed the website administrator can then login to the backend administration console and set up sections, categories, content items, polls and much more. A point and click interface is imbedded into the Joomla interface and from there it is just a simple matter of a few clicks here and there and the site is then energized through Joomla.
WYSIWYG
As new content is created and ready to be installed in the site, a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor allows for easy editing and all without the knowledge of HTML or CSS. This is a far cry from the usual website development tools of the past such a HTML and others and is making the function of a website that much simpler and vastly improved. Everyone desires an easier, more hands-on approach to website development and this is exactly what is achieved with Joomla.
HTML Primer Benefit
As mentioned above the necessity to know HTML coding, like a website development professional, is not mandatory in the very least. What is beneficial and advised is for the newer Joomla users to take a few HTML primer courses in the event that something needs to be edited on a more customized level. Joomla community forums are readily available online with thousands of programmers and designers ready and willing to spread the good news about Joomla to all comers.
Free and Open Source
Joomla is a free, open source content management system that is written in PHP for publishing and managing content on the Internet. The realm of the interior based Intranets are not left out with Joomla as even the users participating in a MySQL database environment can reap the rewards of this magnificent CMS program.
RSS Feeds
Some of the greatest characteristics of the Joomla platform include; page caching to improve performance, web indexing, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, newsflashes, blogs, forums, polls, calendars, website searching, and language internationalization.
Swahili Word
To better explain what Joomla is all about it is necessary to start from the beginning. The word Joomla is a phonetic spelling of the Swahili word "jumla" meaning "all together" or "as a whole". It was selected to reflect the overall commitment of the development team and community. The initial release of Joomla (Joomla 1.0.0) was cited on September 16, 2005. This was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 and was bundled with a few other bug and moderate-level security fixes.
The project site can be located at www.joomla.org.
Joomla! Features:
♦ 100% Database Driven Site Engines
♦ News, Products or Services Sections Fully Editable and Manageable by the managers
♦ Content easily added by Contributing Authors
♦ Fully Customizable Layouts - Left, Center and Right Menu Boxes
♦ Browser Upload of Images to Library for use Anywhere in Site
♦ Dynamic Forum/Poll/Voting Booth
♦ Operates 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. Download templates and implement them in seconds
♦ Layout preview. See how it looks before going live
♦ Banner manager. Make money out of your site
How Much is Joomla?
Joomla is free software created and fully written by an organized group of dedicated, passionate code contributors under the GPL License. One of the greatest benefits of Joomla development is in the details and one such impressive detail is that this new coding source can be completed as a side project. Most of these Joomla developers cite the ability to work on their full-time jobs and projects as well as a Joomla procedure. Some individuals have been able to offer services for Joomla like Joomla templates, components, and other add-ons that make it even more dynamically functional and useful to all. If your looking for a straight out of the box solution for managing web content, combined with the easy ability to edit these pages in-house, then it is Joomla that has been waiting for you.
