Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Features

The Joomla! package consists of many different parts, which allow modular extensions and integrations to be made easily. An example of such are extensions called "Plugins". (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 3,000 extensions for Joomla! available via the Extensions Directory.

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, create URLs that are more friendly to search engines and add shopping cart functionality for e-commerce website.. "Modules" perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc., to be inserted within the base Joomla! code..

Joomla! permits administrators to set global configuration parameters that affect every article.. Every page conforms to these parameters by default, but a page can have its own setting for each parameter. For example, you can select to show or hide the article author or simply go with the global "show author" parameter.
 
What are some real world examples of what Joomla! can do?

Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:

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

I need to build a site for a client. How will Joomla! help me?

Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you're not an advanced user. Many Web hosting services offer a single-click install, getting your new site up and running in just a few minutes.

Since Joomla is so easy to use, as a Web designer or developer, you can quickly build sites for your clients. Then, with a minimal amount of instruction, you can empower your clients to easily manage their own sites themselves.

If your clients need specialized functionality, Joomla is highly extensible and thousands of extensions (most for free under the GPL license) are available in the Joomla Extensions Directory.

Is a CMS website search engine friendly?

• CMS offers the best platform to develop sites that meet all the SEO requirements.
• HTML layout is well formed with no nestled tables making it easy to read for crawlers.
• We can ensure that URL's do not have any query strings. The URL's can be of the type www.yoursite.com/pagename.html Such URL's are extremely Search engine friendly.
• Meta keywords can be defined at a global level (across the site) and also at page level.

How can I be sure there will be Joomla! support in the future?

Joomla is the most popular open source CMS currently available as evidenced by a vibrant and growing community of friendly users and talented developers. Joomla's roots go back to 2000 and, with over 200,000 community users and contributors, the future looks bright for the award-winning Joomla Project.