Maybe you have some experience building websites the traditional way. That basically meant creating HTML documents—web pages—one by one. As the site grew, you'd end up with a bunch of HTML documents, trying to keep all of them organized and making sure all menu links stayed up-to-date. You'd probably maintain the site by yourself because anyone else who added content would have to know their way around in the structure of your particular site, and be proficient in the web editing software you use.
Enter the Holy Grail of web building: the Content Management System! A CMS is an application that runs on a web server that allows you to develop and maintain a website online. It comes packed with tools and features, from basic features to add and modify content to advanced functionality such as user registration or site search capability. In short, a CMS makes it possible to build sites that would normally involve a full team of web professionals with a massive amount of time, money, and expertise at their disposal.
All that magic is made possible because a CMS is really an advanced set of scripts (written in a scripting language, such as PHP) that uses a database to store the content of your website. From that database, it retrieves bits and pieces of content and presents them as web pages.This dynamic way of storing and presenting content makes a CMS very flexible. Do you want to show only a selection of articles from a specific category on a page? Do you want to display only the intro texts and images of the most recent articles on the home page? Do you want to add a list of links to the most popular contents? Do you want to limit access to registered users? It's all possible—just pick the right settings. Additionally, a CMS allows you to integrate all sorts of extra features, such as contact forms, picture galleries, and much more.
The best part is that CMSes like these are yours to download and deploy today. You can pick your CMS of choice from a range of freely available open-source products. Your new CMS-powered site can be online tomorrow. Now how's that for a great deal?
There are many open-source CMSes around. They're all great tools, each with its own typical uses and benefits. Why would you want to choose Joomla!?
People tend to choose Joomla! because they find it easy to use. It has a clear and friendly user interface. It makes it easy to manage content and easy to create and publish articles to keep your site current—anytime, anywhere—using a web browser.
Adding new features takes just a few clicks. There are thousands of extensions available, from menu systems to commenting systems and forums.
It's very easy to change the site's appearance—templates are abundant and can be installed within minutes, giving your site a fresh look and feel.
Joomla! is actively developed and it's well supported by a huge worldwide community of users and developers. It is updated frequently, adding new features, security enhancements, and other improvements.
Apart from these typical Joomla! benefits, it comes with all of the advantages of a state-of-the-art CMS. Just a few examples are:
It's really easy to add or edit content and to keep it organized (even if there's lots of it).
Keeping hyperlinks up-to-date is greatly automated. For example, if you add a new web page to a category a new link will automatically appear in pages pointing to that category.
You don't have to maintain the website all by yourself. Other users can add content, add new menu items, and much more.
The numbers seem to indicate that Joomla! is the open-source CMS of choice for web builders worldwide. It's the engine behind some 20 million websites worldwide and this number is still growing rapidly day by day. Joomla! is one of the biggest open-source software projects around, supported by a huge user community and constantly being developed further by an international team of volunteers.
Let's have a look at some great real-world examples of sites built using Joomla!—if you're anything like me, that's what makes you want to get started right away, creating something equally cool (or preferably, something even better!). These are just a few examples from the Web and from the Joomla! site showcase (http://community.joomla.org/showcase). They are very diverse sites from very different organizations, each with their own goals and target groups. What they have in common is that they deploy Joomla! in a way that you could too. They all create a great Web appearance by adapting the CMS to their specific needs, making it perfectly suited for the content they present and the impression they want to make.
Here's an example from a non-profit organization: Green Energy Solutions (http://masteringgreen.com). It shows a clean corporate design, displaying a few highlights from the site's contents combined with simple and clear navigation.
The following example is a relatively small website of a specialized company (www.abbeyfloor.co.uk). The site offers a clear and attractive overview of the services and products. The design is a customization of a freely available Joomla! template.
Of course, Joomla! can handle much more content; complex sites with thousands of pages are no exception. Here's an illustration of a content-rich site with a made-to-measure design, offering its various target groups different ways to reach the site's contents: the University of Nebraska website (http://nebraska.edu):
One final example demonstrates that Joomla! sites don't have to look anything like a typical Joomla! site. If you want to take customization to the max, you can use an entirely different design—and still take advantage of Joomla!'s default functionality to power the site. The following is a site of a Dutch freelance cook (www.tijskookt.nl):
Note
If you're looking for some more inspiration, browse the official Joomla! showcase: http://community.joomla.org/showcase or go to www.bestofjoomla.com and look around the Best of Sites section.