Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerfulonline applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available.
SinceJoomla is based on PHP and MySQL, you're building powerful applications on an open platform anyone can use, share, and support. Joomla ishighly extensible and thousands of extensions (most of them free under the GPL license) are available in the Joomla extension directory.

Joomla as Content management system (CMS):

A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site , much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don't have to.

Joomla is the most popular open source CMS currently available and has an ever growing community of friendly users and talented developers. With over 200,000 community users and contributors, the future looks bright for the award-winning Joomla Project.

Recently Found:
The Joomla Project announced the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.14 This release contains fixes for two material bugs that were introduced in version 1.5.13 and one low level security issue.

Features of Joomla:

The Joomla package consists of many different parts, which allow modular extensions and integrations to be made easily with joomla you can create Plugins that are background extensions that extend Joomla with new functionality.
There are over 4,000 extensions 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 friendlier to search engines.
“Modules" perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google etc., to be inserted within the base Joomla code.
Joomla permits administrators to set global configuration parameters. Every page follows these parameters by default, but a page can have its own setting.

User Management

Joomla‘s registration system allows users to configure personal options. There are nine user groups with various types of permissions on what users are allowed to access, edit, publish and administrate.
Joomla support multiple protocols, including LDAP, OpenID, and even Gmail.

Media Manager

The Media Manager is the tool for easily managing media files or folders and you can configure the MIME type settings to handle any type of file. The Media Manager is integrated into the Article Editor tool so you can grab images and other files at any time.

Language Manager

Joomla supports many languages and UTF-8 encoding. If you need your Web site in one language and the administrator panel in another, it is possible.

Banner Management

Once you add campaigns and as many banners as you need, you can set impression numbers, special URLs, and more.

Contact Management

The Contact Manager helps your users to find the right person and their contact information. It also supports multiple contact forms going to specific individuals as well as groups.

Polls

It's easy to create polls with multiple options.

Search-

Help navigate users to most popular search items and provide the admin with search statistics.

Web Link Management

Providing link resources for site users is simple and you can sort them into categories, even count every click.

Content Management

Joomla's simplified three-tiered system of articles makes organizing your content a snap. You can organize your content any way you want and not necessarily how it will be on your Web site. Your users can rate articles, e-mail them to a friend, or automatically save a PDF (with UTF-8 support for all languages). Administrators can archive content for safekeeping, hiding it from site visitors.
On public Web sites, built-in e-mail cloaking protects email addresses from spambots.
Creating content is simple with the WYSIWYG editor, giving even novice users the ability to combine text, images in an attractive way. Once you've created your articles, there are a number of pre-installed modules to show the most popular articles, latest new items, newsflashes, related articles, and more.

Syndication and Newsfeed Management

With Joomla, it's easy to syndicate your site content, allowing your users to subscribe to new content in their favorite RSS reader. It's equally easy to integrate RSS feeds from other sources and aggregate them all on your site.

Menu Manager

The Menu Manager allows you to create as many menus and menu items as you like. Put one menu in multiple places and in any style you want; use rollovers, dropdown, fly outs and just about any other navigation system you can think of. Also automatic breadcrumbs are generated to help navigate your site users.

Template Management

Templates in Joomla are a powerful way to make your site look exactly the way you want and either uses a single template for the entire site or a separate template for each site section. The level of visual control goes a step further with powerful template overrides, allowing you to customize each part of your pages.

Integrated Help System

Joomla has a built-in help section to assist users with finding what they need. A glossary explains the terms in plain English, a version checker makes sure you're using the latest version, a system information tool helps you troubleshoot, and, if all else fails, links to a wealth of online resources for additional help and support.

System Features

Quick page loads are possible with page caching, granular-level module caching, and GZIP page compression.
Debugging mode and error reporting are invaluable for troubleshooting.
The FTP Layer allows file operations without having to make all the folders and files writable, increasing the security of your site.

Web Services

With Web services, you can use Remote Procedure Calls (via HTTP and XML).

Implementations of Joomla:
Some real world examples of what you can do with the help of joomla

• Corporate Web sites or portals
• Corporate intranets and extranets
• Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
• E-commerce and online reservations
• Government applications
• Small business Web sites
• Non-profit and organizational Web sites
• Community-based portals
• School and church Web sites
• Personal or family homepages

Joomla's powerful application framework makes it easy for developers to create sophisticated add-ons. The Joomla framework enables developers to build:

• Inventory control systems
• Data reporting tools
• Application bridges
• Custom product catalogs
• Integrated e-commerce systems
• Complex business directories
• Reservation systems
• Communication tools

Our Experiences In Joomla