What is Joomla!

Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websitesand other powerful online applications. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freelyavailable to everybody.

The name Joomla! is a phonetic spelling for the Swahili word "Jumla", which means "all together"or "as a whole".Joomla! is created by the same award-winning team that brought the Mambo CMS to its current
state of stardom.

What sets Joomla apart from the rest is our dedication to keeping things as simple as possible whileproviding the most features possible. Finally, non-technical people can have complete control overtheir websites without paying exorbitant amounts for closed, proprietary software.

Joomla is more than just software, it is people. The community behind Joomla includes developers,designers, systems administrators, translators, content writers, and most importantly the end users.

Joomla is used all over the world to power everything from simple, personal homepages to complex corporate web applications.

Here are just some of the ways people use our software:
* Corporate websites or portals
* Online commerce
* Small business websites
* Non-profit and organizational websites
* Government applications
* Corporate intranets and extranets
* School and church websites
* Personal or family homepages
* Community-based portals
* Magazines and newspapers
* the possibilities are limitless…

Joomla can be used to easily manage every aspect of your website, from adding content and images to updating a product catalog or taking online reservations.

Joomla for End Users

The basic Joomla package is designed to be easy to install, even for non-programmers. Most people have no trouble getting our software up and running, and there is plenty of support available fornewbies. We have a growing, active community of more than 26,000 friendly users and developers on our forums eager to help.Once Joomla is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or editcontent, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go.

Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla site. Via a simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add new press releases or newsitems, manage staff pages, job listings, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your site. You can try our simple demo to get quick taste of what Joomla is all about.

Taking Joomla to the Next Level

Out of the box, Joomla does a great job of managing the content needed to make your website sing. But for many people, the true power of Joomla lies in the application framework that makes itpossible for thousands of developers around the world to create powerful add-ons and extensions.

Here are just some examples of the hundreds of available extensions:
* Dynamic form builders
* Business or organizational directories
* Document management
* image and multimedia galleries
* E-commerce and shopping cart engines
* Forums and chat software
* Calendars
* Blogging software
* Directory services
* Email newsletters
* Data collection and reporting tools
* Banner advertising systems
* Subscription services
* and many, many more…

You can find more examples over at our growing Joomla! Extensions Directory. Prepare to be amazed at the amount of exciting work produced by our active developer community!

Joomla for Developers

Many companies or organizations have requirements that go beyond what is available in the basic Joomla package or in a freely available extension.Thankfully, Joomla offers a powerful application framework that makes it easy for developers tocreate sophisticated add-ons that extend the power of Joomla into virtually unlimited directions.

Using the core framework, developers can easily build:
* Integrated e-commerce systems
* Inventory control systems
* Data reporting tools
* Custom product catalogs
* Complex business directories
* Reservation systems
* Communication tools
* Application bridges
* or any kind of application to suit a unique need…

If your company or organization hires a third party Joomla developer or builds in-house software using the Joomla framework, you are building on an open platform that does not tie you to any one developer or to a proprietary, closed application.You can learn more about developing on the Joomla framework over at our developer’s network.The beauty of Joomla is that you can leverage our framework and user interface to deliver applications to your end users in a familiar, powerful environment.

So what’s the catch?

There is no catch. Joomla is free, open, and available to all under the GPL license. We don’t claim to be perfect, and can’t promise to meet every requirement in the world. But for many webapplications, our software is perfectly suited for the job. We are adding great new features with eachrelease, and with the help and advice of our incredible user community we plan on delivering award-winning software for years to come.

Other Features:
* Publish On Specific DatesWith the click of the mouse you can specify when a section launches.
* You might use this for a sale. Suppose it's a one week only sale. What you're selling can thenbe configured for sale prices and exactly what days and hours those items will be available forthe sale price. As soon as the time is expired, the sale page literally no longer publishes and ismoved automatically into the archive section of your site.
* You can unarchive it yearly, make changes, etc. All of this does not require programming,
uploading or any other activity that would induce an error.
* You can use this feature to launch a new product line.
* View the site exactly how it will look before launch
* Set it to launch right down to the minute.
* Build small teaser sections that promotes this launch weeks, days and hours ahead of the actual launch
* You can use this section to build a daily news section.

Sections, Categories and Content.

All content belongs to a Category. All Categories belong to a Section. A Section can contain one or many Categories.This Section/Category schema is fairly flexible. You can rename either and you can move categories so that they belong with another section.You would think that the navigation menu would be automatically generated but that's not the casein Joomla. And that's good because just as the data is separated from the style, so too is the menu separated from the Section/Category schema.

The consequence is elegant: You can name your nav items anything you want. Further, you candirect those nav items to display everything in a Section, everything in a Category, or display just specific content item. Further, you can have it link to another website outside your own. Or, you can even have an outside website link appear right in the main body of your website. Not that you wouldwant to, but at least you can see how powerful and flexible the navigation structure is.

Templates

Joomla uses templates to place your navigation and content items in. There are hundreds if not thousands of templates.

Bear in mind that almost everything about these templates is editable. You can change the way text and images look. You can drop in flash driven navigation menus if you wish.

Key Features
• Dynamic content generation using SQL database
• news, articles, services, products or any other completely editable sections
• Content updated by contributing authors
• Fully customizable template system
• Upload your images to use anywhere on the site
• Forums and Polls for feedback
• Search Engine friendly pages to give you the best possible search engine position
• Create different menus, change the order, create new menus
• Add newsflashes to catch attention
• Object Orientated Heirarchy design to allow many categories, departments
• 100's of news feeds from all over the globe ready to deliver news instantly to your readers
• Archive older content items rather than destroying them
• E-Mail or print any article at the click of a button
• User friendly administration