Designing your own website can be a daunting task, but the Joomla! Content Management System can make it simple and easy to accomplish. In this introductory article to a forthcoming educational series on Joomla!, learn what it is, who uses it, and how it can help you meet your web development needs.
In short, a CMS does exactly what its name implies. It helps a website developer to manage the content of the website. Typically, CMS sites consist of two distinctive parts: The Content Management Application (CMA) and the content itself. The actual content can be virtually anything - text blogs or articles, photos, music, video, anything you want! In addition, CMSs require very little in the way of technical skill, experience, or knowledge. Since the system manages the content, you don't have to! They are the ideal solution for anyone looking to design their own website and want it to be professional, complete, and successful.
CMSs come in all different types, sizes, and flavors, from the distinctly minimalist to the robust, rich, feature and extension heavy that can produce a two-thousand page content heavy website in a matter of hours. Joomla! is one of these robust and feature-full types of CMS. It can be as simple as a front page with a few links to various internal or external content sources or it could be a content rich industry-standard resource with tens of thousands of pages, articles, authors, and editors designing and managing it. Not to be cliche, but, the sky really is the limit.
One of the most distinct advantages to Joomla! is that it is open source and freely available for anyone to use. Since Joomla! is open source and therefore licensed under the GPL, the multitude of extensions written for it are also open source. This means that if the default, or core, installation of Joomla! is missing a feature that you need, you will likely be able to find an extension to suit your needs that is either free to use, or requires a small "donation". The best thing about open source applications, such as Joomla! and its extensions, is the supportive and helpful community behind it. Since open source development is typically the product of hundreds or even thousands of volunteers, each application is backed by a community of professionals whos soul purpose is to make sure their software is everything you need it to be.
The Joomla! project goes all the way back to 2000 and since that time has built up a user and developer base of over 200,000. It is the most popular open source CMS currently available and has a big, bright future ahead of it.
Joomla! isn't only designed for "newbies" or aspiring web developers. It is used by many industry professionals and large companies as a basis for their websites, including:
- Public and private corporate websites
- On-line magazines, newspapers, and publishing sites
- E-Commerce
- Non-profit Organizations
- Government web applications
- Small Business websites
- Personal Homepages
As you can see, Joomla! has many uses and applications, as well as an impressive list of high-profile users, including the United Nations! You can learn more about Joomla! on their information page to help you decide if it is the right solution for your web development needs.