Joomla CMS! is a free, open source content management system for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets. The system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching and language internationalization. Joomla is licensed under the GPL, and is the result of a fork of Mambo.

The name Joomla is properly written with an exclamation mark as that is part of the name, but this is commonly omitted.

It is written in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database by default.

History. Joomla! came into being as the result of a fork of Mambo by the development team on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was trademarked by Miro International Pty Ltd, who formed a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose to fund the project and protect it from lawsuits. The development team claimed that many of the provisions of the foundation structure went against previous agreements made by the elected Mambo Steering Committee, lacked the necessary consultation with key stake holders, and included provisions that violated core open source values.

The development team created a web site called OpenSourceMatters to distribute information to users, developers, web designers, and the community in general. The project team leader Andrew Eddie, aka "MasterChief" wrote an open letter to the community, which appeared on the announcements section of the public forum at mamboserver.com.

A thousand people had joined the opensourcematters.org web site within a day, most posting words of encouragement and support. The web site received the slashdot effect as a result. Miro CEO Peter Lamont gave a public response to the development team in an article entitled "The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro".

This event stirred deeply held feelings in the free software community regarding what shall constitute "open source". Forums at many other open source projects were active with postings for and against the actions of both sides.

In the two weeks following Eddie's announcement teams were re-organized and the community continued to grow. Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) assisted the Joomla! core team beginning in August 2005, as indicated by Moglen's blog entry from that date and a related OSM announcement. The SFLC continue to provide legal guidance to Joomla! project.

On August 18, 2005, Andrew Eddie called for community input on suggested names for the project. The development team indicated that it would make the final decision for the project name based on community input. The name the development team chose was not in the list of suggested names provided by the community as it was chosen with consultation from a professional brand consultancy under the pay of Open Source Matters.

On September 1, 2005 the new name, "Joomla", which is the English spelling of the Swahili (Arabic:جملة ,and Urdu: جملہ ) word jumla meaning "all together" or "as a whole" was announced.

On September 7, 2005, the development team called for logo submissions from the community, invited the community to vote on the logo preferred, and announced the community's decision on September 22, 2005. Following the logo selection, Brand Guidelines, a Brand Manual, and set of Logo Resources were published on October 2, 2005 for the community's use.

The first release of Joomla (Joomla 1.0.0) was announced on September 16, 2005. This was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 combined with other bug and moderate-level security fixes. Joomla version 1.5 was released on January 22, 2008. Joomla won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in 2006 and 2007.

FEATURES. The Joomla package consists of many different parts, which are built to be as modular as possible, allowing 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 (freeware or commercial) 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 and create URLs that are more friendly to search engines. "Modules" perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc to be inserted within the base Joomla code.

Since it has been around longer, there are more extensions available for Joomla 1.0 than for Joomla 1.5, although native 1.5 extensions are becoming increasingly available. Some of the older 1.0 extensions can be used with version 1.5 if it is set to legacy mode.

Joomla permits administrators to set global configuration parameters that affect all articles. Every page conforms to these parameters by default, but a page can have its own setting for each parameter. For example, you can elect to show the article author, hide the author, or simply go with the global "show author" parameter.

The basic Joomla! package is designed to be easy to install, even for non-programmers. Once Joomla! is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site.

Via a simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add new press releases or news items, manage staff pages, job listings, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your site.

System Requirements:

  • Application Server: Apache recommended, any server that supports PHP and MySQL
  • Approximate Cost: $0
  • Database: MySQL
  • License: GNU/GPL v2
  • Operating System: Any
  • Programming Language: PHP
  • Root Access: Not needed
  • Shell Access: Not needed
  • Web Server: Apache

Security:

  • Captcha (Free Add On)
  • Content Approval
  • Email Verification
  • LDAP Authentication
  • Login History
  • Session Management
  • SSL Logins

Support:

  • Commercial Manuals
  • Commercial Support
  • Commercial Training
  • Developer Community
  • Online Help
  • Pluggable API
  • Professional Hosting
  • Professional Services
  • Public Forum
  • Third-Party Developers
  • Users Conference

Ease of Use:

  • Email To Discussion (Free Add On)
  • Friendly URLs
  • Image Resizing
  • Macro Language
  • Prototyping
  • Server Page Language
  • Template Language
  • WYSIWYG Editor

Management:

  • Advertising Management
  • Asset Management
  • Content Scheduling
  • Inline Administration
  • Online Administration
  • Sub-sites / Roots
  • Themes / Skins
  • Trash
  • Web Statistics
  • Web-based Style/Template Management
  • Web-based Translation Management (Free Add On)

Interoperability:

  • Content Syndication (RSS)
  • FTP Support (Free Add On)
  • UTF-8 Support

Flexibility:

  • Content Reuse
  • Extensible User Profiles
  • Interface Localization
  • Metadata
  • Multi-lingual Content  (Free Add On)
  • Multi-lingual Content Integration (Free Add On)
  • Multi-Site Deployment (Free Add On)
  • URL Rewriting

Performance:

  • Advanced Caching
  • Page Caching

Built-in Applications:

  • Blog
  • Chat  (Free Add On)
  • Classifieds (Free Add On)
  • Contact Management
  • Data Entry (Free Add On)
  • Database Reports (Free Add On)Discussion / Forum (Free Add On)
  • Document Management (Free Add On)
  • Events Calendar (Free Add On)
  • Events Management (Free Add On)
  • Expense Reports (Free Add On)
  • FAQ Management
  • File Distribution (Free Add On)
  • Graphs and Charts (Free Add On)
  • Groupware (Free Add On)
  • Guest Book (Free Add On)
  • Help Desk / Bug Reporting (Free Add On)
  • Job Postings (Free Add On)
  • Link Management
  • Mail Form
  • Newsletter (Free Add On)
  • Photo Gallery (Free Add On)
  • Polls
  • Product Management
  • Project Tracking (Free Add On)
  • Search Engine
  • Site Map (Free Add On)
  • Surveys (Free Add On)
  • Syndicated Content (RSS)
  • Tests / Quizzes (Free Add On)
  • User Contributions
  • Weather (Free Add On)
  • Web Services Front End (Free Add On)
  • Wiki (Free Add On)

Commerce:

  • Affiliate Tracking (Free Add On)
  • Inventory Management (Free Add On)
  • Pluggable Payments (Free Add On)
  • Pluggable Shipping (Free Add On)
  • Pluggable Tax (Free Add On)
  • Point of Sale (Free Add On)
  • Shopping Cart (Free Add On)
  • Subscriptions (Free Add On)
  • Wish Lists (Free Add On)

Out of the box, Joomla! does a great job of managing the content needed to make your website sing. But for many people, the true power of Joomla! lies in the application framework that makes it possible for thousands of developers and companies around the world to create powerful add-ons and extensions. Here are just some examples of the hundreds of available extensions:

  • Dynamic form builders
  • Business or organizational directories
  • Document management
  • Image and multimedia galleries
  • E-commerce and shopping cart engines
  • Forums and chat software
  • Calendars
  • Blogging software
  • Directory services
  • Email newsletters
  • Data collection and reporting tools
  • Banner advertising systems
  • Subscription services
  • and many, many more…

Like us, many companies or organizations have requirements that go beyond what is available in the basic Joomla! package or in a freely available extension. 

Joomla! offers a powerful application framework that makes it easy for developers to create sophisticated add-ons that extend the power of Joomla! into virtually unlimited directions. Using the core framework, developers can easily build:

  • Integrated e-commerce systems
  • Inventory control systems
  • Data reporting tools
  • Custom product catalogs
  • Complex business directories
  • Reservation systems
  • Communication tools
  • Application bridges
  • or any kind of application to suit a unique need…

COMMUNITY. Joomla has an official and many unofficial communities. As of February 2008, the official Joomla forum has more than 260,000 threads and over 1.2 million posts from more than 170,000 registered members in 40 languages. Unofficial sites are published in many languages, often with Joomla extensions that are region specific. Bi-directional text support for the Hebrew and Arabic languages, for example, can be found on 3rd party community portals. Unofficial web developers also build extensions and web templates for commercial sale and offer freelance customization services. Usually a template is distributed as a zip file

which can be installed using the Joomla installer.

So where do I get it? You can download Joomla! from the Joomlacode website or from the project site available under http://www.joomla.org/download.html

How much does it cost? Joomla is free software written by an organized group of dedicated code contributors under the GPL License.

Source: Wikipedia.org