A Brief Introduction To Joomla!

Reading time: Approximately 3 minutes

In the past on CMOR we’ve talked a lot about WordPress and what kinds of sites you can use that for.

WordPress is far and away the most popular free CMS (Content Management System) on the market today. It shouldn’t come as a surprise though, as popular as it is, that it isn’t the ideal choice for some applications.

Content Management Systems aren’t new, in fact they evolved out of necessity. You see, for a long time it was quite difficult to manage and update complicated websites that involved a lot of behind the scenes processing and database interaction.

This led to the creation of Content Management Systems in their present form whereby a user with relatively little computer knowledge could administer a complex website like an eCommerce store.

To have a highly complicated system with a user friendly back end allowing for updates by people that don’t know and understand about databases and programming languages used to cost a *lot* of money to develop.

Luckily, you have Joomla!

What Is Joomla!?

Joomla! is a brilliant free content management system, similar to WordPress, but with more features allowing for a larger range of website applications.

It has a backend administration component, again similar to WordPress, which allows for customization of the front end of the website (the part your visitors see) without knowledge of it’s inner workings.

Joomla! can be used for a humble blog, but really excels at eCommerce, membership sites, and other more complex setups.

Extensions

Just like WordPress, Joomla! itself doesn’t do a whole lot other than the framework. It’s the power of plugins (called extension in Joomla!) that once again comes into play.

The Joomla! platform has long been a favourite of Joomla! Extension developers with quite a number of quality free extensions up for use in the Extensions community.

Extensions in Joomla! cover many categories such as e-Commerce, content & news, photo galleries, multimedia, mailing lists, and much much more. It includes over 3000 extensions available for use.

Support

Documentation is quite good, and a thriving forum community exists to help with questions about using Joomla. Quite often extensions will also have communities and websites that exist to server those audiences as well, so while a lot of extensions are free and come with no official support, answers to questions can be found by searching online.

Conclusion

As Joomla! is one of the only platforms that I recommend for newbies to pickup and use, I plan on covering this platform in some detail in the future. I’ll talk mostly for eCommerce related applications but this may evolve as we become more familiar with it.

For now, I’ll leave you to explore the official Joomla! website and read some of the introductory documentation. I think you’ll find Joomla! to be quite interesting as it opens a lot more opportunities than it’s humble cousin WordPress.