What is Joomla?

What's a content management system (CMS)?

A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your website, 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 websites of all shapes and sizes. For example:

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

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 administer.

Authentication is an important part of user management, and Joomla supports 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 a tool used for easily managing media files or folders, allowing you to 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

Joomla has international support for many world languages and UTF-8 encoding. If you need your website in one language and the administrator panel in another, multiple languages are possible.

Banner Management

It's easy to set up banners on your website 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.

Contact Management

The Contact Manager helps your users find the right person and contact information. It also supports multiple contact forms going to specific individuals as well as groups.

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 the most popular search items and provide the admin with search statistics.

Web Link Management

Providing link resources for site users is simple. Resources can be sorted into categories, and every click can be counted.

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 displayed on your website. Your users can rate articles, email 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 websites, built-in email cloaking protects email addresses from spambots.

Creating content is simple with the WYSIWYG editor, giving even novice users the ability to combine text and 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.

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.