What is Joomla?

The content management system we recommend as standard is the multi-award winning Joomla CMS. Joomla has become one of the most popular CMS systems in the world, powering millions of websites: it has been estimated that around 5% of the world's corporate websites now rely on Joomla.

So what is Joomla? 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 non-proprietary system, supported by a wide international developer community with 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 MVC model of integrated templates, components and modules couples editing simplicity with great flexibility of design, and the system can accommodate sites with both a high design ethos as well as standardised template layouts.

Content editing is web based through a secure back-office system, utilising WYSIWYG forms for text and media, 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  A wide range of publishing controls are also available, allowing items to be prepared and published and unpublished automatically at some future date.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/blogging (including RSS content syndication), multi-level editors, trash management, page version control, basic user statistics, content rating, and and advanced multi-level Access Control Level (ACL) system. And combining Joomla with the Virtuemart e-Commerce component, creates a hugely powerful and fully featured e-commerce store. 

More information: www.joomla.org