What is Joomla:
Joomla is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS), which enables the development of Web sites that can be easily updated by the Client using User-Friendly, Password-protected Control Panels. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available.
What's a Content Management System (CMS)?:
A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site, much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don't have to.
Features:
Content Management
Joomla's simplified three-tiered system of articles makes organizing your content a snap. You can organize your content any way you want and not necessarily how it will be on your Web site. Your users can rate articles, e-mail them to a friend, or automatically save a PDF (with UTF-8 support for all languages). Administrators can archive content for safekeeping, hiding it from site visitors.
On public Web sites, built-in e-mail cloaking protects email addresses from spambots.
Creating content is simple with the WYSIWYG editor, giving even novice users the ability to combine text, images in an attractive way. Once you've created your articles, there are a number of pre-installed modules to show the most popular articles, latest new items, newsflashes, related articles, and more.
Menu Manager
The Menu Manager allows you to create as many menus and menu items as you need. You can structure your menu hierarchy (and nested menu items) completely independent of your content structure. Also automatic breadcrumbs are generated to help navigate your site users.
User Management
Joomla has a registration system that allows users to configure personal options. There are nine user groups with various types of permissions on what users are allowed to access, edit, publish and administrate.
Authentication is an important part of user management and Joomla support multiple protocols, including LDAP, OpenID, and even Gmail. This allows users to use their existing account information to streamline the registration process.
Media Manager
The Media Manager is the tool for easily managing media files or folders and you can configure the MIME type settings to handle any type of file. The Media Manager is integrated into the Article Editor tool so you can grab images and other files at any time.
Language Manager
There is international support for many world languages and UTF-8 encoding. If you need your Web site in one language and the administrator panel in another, multiple languages are possible.
Banner Management
It's easy to set up banners on your Web site using the Banner Manager, starting with creating a client profile. Once you add campaigns and as many banners as you need, you can set impression numbers, special URLs, and more.
Polls
If you want to find out more about your users, it's easy to create polls with multiple options.
Search
Help navigate users to most popular search items and provide the admin with search statistics.
Syndication and Newsfeed Management
With Joomla, it's easy to syndicate your site content, allowing your users to subscribe to new content in their favorite RSS reader. It's equally easy to integrate RSS feeds from other sources and aggregate them all on your site.
System Features
Speedy page loads are possible with page caching, granular-level module caching, and GZIP page compression.
Administators quickly and efficiently communicate with users one-on-one through private messaging or all site users via the mass mailing system.
[Note: Features deployed are on a Project-by-Project basis]
Who uses Joomla?
Here are just a few examples of Web sites that use Joomla:
- United Nations (Governmental organization) - http://www.unric.org
- MTV Networks Quizilla (Social networking) - http://www.quizilla.com
- L.A. Weekly (Online publication) - http://www.laweekly.com
- IHOP (Restaurant chain) - http://www.ihop.com
- Harvard University (Educational) - http://gsas.harvard.edu
- Citibank (Financial institution intranet) - Not publicly accessible
- The Green Maven (Eco-resources) - http://www.greenmaven.com
- Outdoor Photographer (Magazine) - http://www.outdoorphotographer.com
- PlayShakespeare.com (Cultural) - http://www.playshakespeare.com
- Senso Interiors (Furniture design) - http://www.sensointeriors.co.za
How can I be sure there will be Joomla! support in the future?:
Joomla is the most popular open source CMS currently available as evidenced by a vibrant and growing community of friendly users and talented developers. Joomla's roots go back to 2000 and, with over 200,000 community users and contributors, the future looks bright for the award-winning Joomla Project.
