What is Joomla?

Joomla is a multi-award winning Content Management System. A Content Management System, commonly known as a "CMS", is a computer program that runs on the server which allows you to manage your web site content through a back office interface accessed through your web browser.

Joomla is a very highly featured content management system released under the Open Source GNU GPL licence that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications.  It is based on "LAMP", the ubiquitous Open Source web server configuration: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and is consequently fast, robust, scaleable and secure.

It is a standard non-proprietary system, supported by a wide international developer community. It has a high level of standard features built-in, and a huge range of third party plug-ins that suit nearly every conceivable application.

The Joomla system of integrated templates, components and modules allows for great flexibility of design, and the system can accommodate both sites with a high design ethos as well as more conventional layouts.

Content editing is web based through a secure back-office system, utilising WYSIWYG forms for text and images, which means no knowledge of HTML is required for content creation or editing.  A wide range of publishing controls are also available, allowing items to be prepared and published and unpublished automatically at some future date.

Included as standard are components to manage FAQ's, links, banners, news (including RSS content syndication), polls, multi-level editors, trash management, basic user statistics, content rating, user registration, and mass mail to registered users.  Common plug-ins include an advanced forms manager, e-mail autoresponse and newsletter manager, events calendar, forum, classified ads, and online catalogue and full e-commerce facilities.

Of course, as well as all these functions and features, Joomla is highly search engine optimisable - unlike many CMS systems which cannot be adapted for search engine performance, Joomla can be used to create search engine friendly sites, with natural page URLs, and custom meta tags.

www.joomla.org