What is Joomla!?
Joomla! is an award-winning open source Content Management System (CMS), enabling you to build powerful database driven website applications.
Joomla! allows you to construct, organize, and manage your website content easily. Joomla! itself is a rapidly evolving product, as are the team and community supporting its growth:
Joomla! creates pages which are publically viewable and also contains a web driven administration area, accessible via a login screen:
Joomla! is utilized all over the world to power intranet and Internet websites of all shapes and sizes.
Examples of where Joomla! is used are:
- Online magazines, news portals, and publications
- Government applications
- School and church websites
- Corporate websites and intranets
- Personal web pages and blogs
- Audio and video portals
Joomla! has become a favored CMS to many people. Some of the reasons for its fast and continued growth include:
- Joomla! is an open source application that is freely available to everyone. For further information about this subject please visit http://www.opensourcematters.org.
- The product has a well structured roadmap for continued development and support.
- Joomla! has a vibrant growing community, creating an excellent help and support network.
- There are thousands of third-party extensions available which offer easily installable additional functionality. This allows powerful new features to be easily added to your Joomla! website, with just a few clicks of the mouse.
- A template structure allows you to completely customize the look and feel of your Joomla! website.
- Backend administration contains powerful features, is flexible and easy to use.
Including multimedia in your Joomla! site
Just like a hand-coded website, your Joomla! website can easily contain multimedia site content. In fact, the Joomla! CMS is constructed to easily create, manage, and present multiple content types, allowing you to publish these on your site pages.
The approach of including multimedia material into a software driven web framework (such as the Joomla! CMS) can be different than that of a hand-coded website. The media elements used will need to be included and deployed in a way conforming to the Joomla! CMS framework.
The Joomla! CMS web platform is designed for content management and to be as lightweight as possible in additional clutter. Out of the box it does a great job at managing content, but the application framework offers the ability for thousands of developers around the world to contribute additional features for the base CMS. These are called Joomla! Extensions.
Joomla! Extensions are third-party products which have been written to enhance the core Joomla! capabilities. They come in all shapes and sizes and can add powerful functionality to your default Joomla! There are thousands of Joomla! Extensions available in the Joomla! Extension Directory (JED) located at http://extensions.joomla.org as well as other Joomla! resources available on the Internet.
Multimedia extensions contribute to a large section of the JED, and we will be highlighting some of the most powerful and useful extensions in the following chapters.