Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

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.

What are some real world examples of what Joomla! can do?

Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:

• Corporate Web sites or portals
• Corporate intranets and extranets
• Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
• E-commerce and online reservations
• Government applications
• Small business Web sites
• Non-profit and organizational Web sites
• Community-based portals
• School and church Web sites
• Personal or family homepages

OVERVIEW

Joomla is a free and open source content management system (CMS) for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets and a model–view–controller (MVC) Web application framework that can also be used independently. Joomla is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and software design patterns, stores data in a MySQL database, and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization. Joomla had been downloaded 23 million times. Between March 2007 and February 2011 there had been more than 21 million downloads.As of November 2011, there are over 8,600 free and commercial extensions available from the official Joomla! Extension Directory and more available from other source

Joomla can be installed manually from source code on a system running a Web server which supports PHP applications, from a package management system or using a virtual appliance, from sources such as the TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library, which comprises the application and its dependencies as a ready-to-use system. There are numerous web hosting companies who provide a control panel which automates the deployment of a basic Joomla Web site. Joomla can also be installed via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer which installs the software on Windows and IIS. The Web PI will automatically detect any missing dependencies such as PHP or MySQL then install and configure them before installing Joomla. 

JOOMLA VIDEO

An Overview of Joomla