Joomla is an award-winning open-source content management system (CMS). It helps to publish web content and is a model–view–controller which is built in web application framework. It can be used independently on the CMS. Joomla is written in PHP and uses object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques. It has software design patterns and stores data in MySQL, MS SQL or PostgreSQL database. It includes various features like – RSS feeds, page caching, news flashes, printable versions of pages, search, blogs, and support for language internationalization.
Till now, Joomla has offered its services to more then 7,700 free and commercial extensions. It is estimated that after WordPress, it is second most used content management system on the Internet. Joomla enables you to build powerful online applications. It has many aspects which includes ease-of-use and extensibility. Joomla is an open source solution, and it is freely available to everyone.
Overview
Joomla! is one of the world’s most popular software packages which is used to build, manage, organize and publish content for blogs, websites, Intranets and mobile applications. It owes a scalable MVC architecture that is why it is also an excellent base to build web applications. Joomla! has more than 3 percent of the Web running and more than 9 percent of CMS market share.
Joomla! Powers the web presence of hundreds of thousands of government organizations, small businesses, non-profits and large organizations worldwide, such as- Harvard University, McDonald’s, Citibank, eBay, Ikea, and Sony. Its CMS led by an international community which has more than a half million active contributors. Joomla helps not only the most inexperienced user but also the seasoned web developer to make their digital visions a reality.
Content Management System (CMS)
A content management system is basically software which keeps tracking on every piece of content on your Web site. It is much like your local public library that keeps track of books and stores them properly. Content can be just a simple text or music, documents, photos, video or just anything you can think of. A major advantage of CMS is that it does not require any technical skill or knowledge to manage it. So you do not need to worry.
Joomla Features
Joomla has various features, some of the major features are – Multilingual, Easy Upgrades, Integrated Help System, Media Manager, Banner Management, Contact Management, Search better, Search Smarter, Content Management, Nested Categorization, Tagging, Frontend Editing, Content Versioning, Syndication and Newsfeed Management, Menu Manager, Powerful Extensibility, Extensive ACL for all your access control needs.
Deployment
Like many other web applications, Joomla can also run on a LAMP stack. Moreover, many web hosts have control panels which have a power of automatic installation of Joomla. On Windows, Joomla can be installed by using Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It automatically detects and installs dependencies, like – PHP or MySQL. There are many web-sites which offer information regarding installing and maintaining Joomla sites.
Advanced ways of using Joomla
Many organizations have requirements that go beyond what is normally available in the Joomla package. In that case, Joomla’s powerful application framework provides sophisticated add-ons which makes it easy for developers to create that extend which they want with virtually unlimited directions. Joomla is based on MySQL and PHP that is why you can build powerful applications on an open platform which anyone can use, share and support.