Joomla - An Open Source CMS worth looking at.



Joomla is an open source CMS system (CMS stands for

Content Management System). I'm currently using Joomla to develop a number of themed web sites. There is a Christmas site, a recipe site and a travel site. Joomla has adapted nicely to each of these themes.

Generally CMS systems are extremely pricey

and somewhat complex to use. I've found Joomla to be quite easy to use

and now a month into using it I am really starting to appreciate it. If

you don't feel like using a simple page development tool and binding

pages together by hand, then you should look at a CMS system. From what

I've found, Joomla seems to be moving forward the quickest. I am

currently using version 1.0.11 which is the latest of the 1.0 line.

Never use 1.0 software, that's what people will tell you and for

the most part, that's true. However in the case of Joomla we must

remember (or perhaps it's my job to educate you) that Joomla's roots

(at least the 1.0 version) are in another CMS system Mambo. In fact, if

you are familiar with Mambo, Joomla will be second nature (and the

other way around).

Joomla is organized in menus, sections, catagories and items. It

fits together kind of like this (general, remember this isn't a book,

it's an article). A menu can link to a section, category or item in a

number of ways (table, list, etc). A section can link to a category. A

category can link to a number of items. So, if you need to organize

your website by menu's or tabs, this is ideal. Of course there is much

more to joomla than that, but that is the first thing you'll end up

doing...just like I did.

Joomla extensions, templates, plug-ins, components

One of

the things I love about Joomla is the wide assortment of plugins and

templates available for it, both commercial and free. I found a site,

joomlahacks.com which has a ton of these things (over 200 freely

downloadable templates). I found one that was appropriate for each of

my sites and with a little modification (you are allowed to modify most

templates as they're part of the GPL) GNU Public License, or LGPL

(lesser GNU public license).

Components that I am using are the metataggenerator component

(downloaded) and the SEO component (allowing more google readable url's

for my web site. Also, like I said I'm using a differently downloaded

(and personally modified) template for each of my sites. My sites are

Christmas, Recipes and Travel. There are a couple more, but why go into

those details.

If you go to joomla.org, you can actually test drive the software. I did this

before setting up the christmas site. I wanted to be sure that joomla was right for me.

They've set up a joomla based server and give you a demo account to

play with. This is great to get a feel for the software. I think the

site gets reset every 30 minutes or something, so don't expect your

content to stay there. Also, please please refrain from spamming on

this website! The joomla folks have been good enough to give us a great

product and let us try it out live, please don't take advantage of

their good nature by putting spam up there.

Which technologies does Joomla use

You could also call this section "what does my webserver/hosting

package need to run joomla"?

- PHP, joomla is a PHP based system. If you don't know what PHP is, you

should search around a bit. It's a language for web development (I

believe loosly based on perl) which can have html embedded in it. I

personally compare it to Java jsp's. I needed to do a bit of PHP modification on the travel and

recipe sites to make things fit properly, but this is not the fault of the original templates or Joomla, I

just wanted a bit of a different look.

- MySQL, joomla needs access to a mysql database. It's installs will

create it's own tables, but of course you need to have the appropriate

permissions to do this.

That's it...although, if it is running on an apache web server it also

makes the SEO stuff work better as you can (possible depending on your

hosting) change the .htaccess file to rewrite urls appropriately.

Linux makes a nice joomla platform, but there's no reason why it can't

run on any platform which has the above capabilities.