Introduction to Joomla

Joomla is a CMS (content management system) that helps you build dynamic and functional websites with a minimum of effort. It is possible to make all kinds of websites with Joomla, from personal websites to blogs and discussion forums, and even fully functional professional websites such as e-commerce stores. All of this is possible because Joomla is supported with hundreds of freely available plug-ins and extensions that can be easily applied to a website to increase its capabilities. By default, Joomla provides all the standard website content, such as menus, articles, and modules, and all of these can be customized via the Administrator interface. Because of this system, the overhead of making a website from scratch is highly reduced.

In a CMS, the content of the website (such as articles, pictures, etc.) is stored in a database, and this makes creating and maintaining a website very simple. Traditional websites are often bulky and unwieldy because they consist of a large amount of content (several web pages) displaying different information to the visitor. The greater the number of web pages, the more difficult is to maintain that website. It is for this reason that the maintenance of a traditional website is usually done by a group of people. But in Joomla, since all the web content is maintained in a database, its maintenance cost is highly reduced, because, asyou’ll see throughout this book, maintaining a database requires less effort than manually changing web content.

Moreover, Joomla provides a user-friendly Administrator interface that guides the administrator through maintaining the website content stored in the database. Even a single person can easily maintain a website with the help of Joomla’s easy-to-use, menu-driven administrative interface. With a little training, a web developer or administrator can easily administer a website, and change its content, navigation features, structure, and so on, with just a few clicks of the mouse. Let’s dig a bit deeper into what a CMS is, and what makes Joomla so special.

What is a CMS?

As mentioned previously, CMS stands for content management system, and it is a software system that enables us to create, edit, and manage documents of different types. These documents can include data files, audio/video files, image files, and most other forms of web content. A CMS not only helps in managing all of this content (without requiring any technical knowledge of HTML), but it also defines different groups of users each with different roles and responsibilities. The idea is that more than one person in an organization can contribute to creating, editing, and managing content, while normal visitors are given limited access privileges—usually just permission to view the content. In short, we can make an easily maintainable website with the help of a CMS where creating, editing, and managing content is a simple task. In a CMS, the whole of the website is contained within a database.

All of the links, articles, user information, images, and other parts of the website are maintained by the administrator using that database. All this talk of databases may sound a bit scary, but all of the website maintenance is carried out using the Administrator interface—a user-friendly menu-driven system that makes the task of updating or managing the content of the website very easy. The Administrator interface is accessed through your web browser and is simple to operate. All the changes that you make in the Administrator interface are reflected in the database where the content of the website is kept.

Making a website from scratch is usually a time-consuming task, and it requires expertise to develop all of the individual parts of a site. The coding and integration of all of these different parts are highly error prone, and need thorough testing procedures before new parts can be added to a website. In a traditional web application, you might have several different criteria for modules that you want to add to your site, such as the following:

• Login system: Provides a means of authenticating a user
• Account Creation module: Provides a user with a form to enter information, which is then stored in a database for future use
• Forgotten Password module: Helps users who have forgotten their password or user ID
• Popular module: Displays popular website content or services
• Polling module: Gets visitor feedback on a chosen subject
• RSS Feed module: Gets your website content syndicated for others to read
• Feed Reader module: Allows the reading of RSS feeds from different websites
• Search box: Enables users to search website content
• Multilingual module: Makes it possible to implement multilingual facilities in your website
• Granting-and-Revoking-Permission module: Facilitates assigning permissions to the user so as to allow them to view or block them from viewing certain information

In a CMS system, all of these modules are already built for you, and are easy to add to an existing site. You just need to configure them and decide on their position and appearance in your website. This makes creating a website very simple, and you can have a website ready in a couple of hours. Also, maintaining the content of the website doesn’t take much effort. The configuration of the modules provided by a CMS and maintenance of the web content is all done using the easy-to-use Administrator interface. (Src: Foundation Joomla)