What is Joomla! ?

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

Joomla! in Action

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 for newbies. We have a growing, active community of more than 150,000 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 edit content, 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 news items, 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 it possible 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 to create 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 web applications, our software is perfectly suited for the job. We are adding great new features with each release, and with the help and advice of our incredible user community we plan on delivering award-winning software for years to come.



source: joomla.org

Joomla is

Joomla! is a free, open source content management system for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets. Joomla! includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization. Joomla! is licensed under the GPL, and is the result of a fork of Mambo.

It is written with the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database.

History

Joomla came into being as the result of a fork of Mambo by all of its then-core developers on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was trademarked by Miro International Pty Ltd, who formed a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose to fund the project and protect it from lawsuits.[1] The development team claimed that many of the provisions of the foundation structure went against previous agreements made by the elected Mambo Steering Committee, lacked the necessary consultation with key stake holders, and included provisions that violated core open source values.[2]

The development team created a web site called OpenSourceMatters to distribute information to users, developers, web designers, and the community in general. The project team leader at the time Andrew Eddie, A.K.A. "MasterChief" (who rejoined the team as of 15 August 2007), wrote an open letter to the community[3] which appeared on the announcements section of the public forum at mamboserver.com.


One thousand people had joined the opensourcematters.org forum web site within a day, most posting words of encouragement and support for the actions of the Development Team. The web site received a slashdotting and news articles regarding the event appeared at newsforge.com, eweek.com, and ZDnet.com. Miro CEO Peter Lamont gave a public response in an article entitled "The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro".[4]

This event has stirred deeply held feelings in the free software community regarding what shall constitute "open source". Forums at many other open source projects were active with postings for and against the actions of both sides. Rumor and accusations of wrongdoing by Miro and the Mambo Foundation were rampant.

In the two weeks following Eddie's announcement teams were re-organized and the community continued to grow. On September 1, 2005 the new name, "Joomla", which is the English spelling of the Swahili (and Urdu: جملہ and Arabic: جملة) word jumla meaning "all together" or "as a whole", was announced to a mixed reception of 3000+ faithful followers of the Development Team. It was chosen to reflect the commitment of the development team and community to the project.[citation needed]

The first release of Joomla (Joomla 1.0.0) was announced on September 16, 2005. This was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 combined with other bug and moderate-level security fixes. In the project's roadmap, the core developers say Joomla 1.5 will be a completely re-written code base built with PHP 5. It was announced in 2006 and has been nominated for the vaporware award 2007, but with the transition from beta to first release candidate (RC1) on 21 July 2007, a second release candidate on 1 September 2007 (RC2) and a third release candidate on 6 October 2007 (RC3), a final product may yet be available before year-end.

Joomla won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in 2006.[5]

Features

The Joomla package consists of many different parts, which are built to be as modular as possible, allowing extensions and integrations to be made easily. An example of such are extensions called "Plugins".[6](Previously known as "Mambots".) Plugins are background extensions that extend Joomla with new functionality. The WikiBot, for example, allows the author of Joomla content to use "Wikitags" in Joomla articles which will auto-create dynamic hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles when displayed. There are over 2,100 extensions for Joomla available via the Extensions Directory, a site that OpenSourceMatters runs as an official directory of extensions.[7]

In addition to Plugins, more comprehensive extensions are available. "Components" allow webmasters to perform such tasks as build a community by expanding user features, backup a website, translate content and create URLS that are more friendly to search engines.[8] "Modules" perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc to be inserted within the base Joomla code.[9]

Community

Joomla has an official and many unofficial communities. As of July 2007, the official Joomla forums claims more than 200,000 threads and over 1 million posts from over 138,000 members in 40 languages.[10] Unofficial sites are published in many languages, often with Joomla extensions that are region specific. Bi-directional text support for the Hebrew and Arabic languages, for example, can be found on 3rd party community portals. Unofficial web developers also build extensions and web templates for commercial sale and offer freelance customization services. Usually a template is distributed as a zip file which can be installed using the Joomla installer.



source: answer.com

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