Joomla - Why Use It?

By Suzann Kale

Why use a complex piece of software rather than just putting up a few pages?

When the Internet got started, all websites were simple pages in very simple HTML. They existed as a page or several pages on a site. The browser went to those sites, the browser presented those files to you and you just read them or looked at the contents and that was about all that happened.

In the last few years, the open source community has made several software systems available that greatly empower websites. It adds functionality, it adds security, and it does many things that formerly required a lot of experience and expertise to put together a website that could do what Joomla does.

CMS. Officially Joomla is called a Content Management System or CMS. That title means that it knows how to handle the content of your site, where the content is the words in an article that you write, or the pictures that you display on the pages, or the movies or audio clips that you play. How all that content is presented to the viewer is controlled by the software that we call Joomla.

There are other CMS systems out there. Several of them are free and there are a lot of commercial systems. But Joomla is one of the well known open source packages that is free to be used by anyone.

Joomla Versus the Old Way. The reason Joomla is valuable compared to building a website by hand, one page at a time, is that Joomla organizes everything and provides functionality that's been de-bugged, tested, and used by hundreds of other people - so that with little effort you can install a complex website.

Once it's installed, the administrative capabilities built into Joomla allow you to maintain that website easily.

What does maintenance mean? A healthy growing website needs to constantly add content to that site. Joomla provides tools to add content and functionality to the site. It also supplies functions that you need for a general purpose website. It comes with contact pages for sending email from visitors without spammers hijacking that function. It allows you to add advertisements to your web pages easily. It allows you to edit files, and change templates to modify and customize the appearance of the website.

How to Learn Joomla. Joomla is a complex tool. How do you learn to use it? First, the Joomla community is very large. That means there are many tutorials and active forums which are excellent sources of information. For example, at Website - Do It Yourself you can find step by step procedures for installing, modifying, and maintaining a Joomla website.

More helpful functions. There are other perks to a Joomla installation. There is a strong community of developers that provides modules, plug-ins, and add-ons. These are easily installed into Joomla and give you such things as forums, community-oriented services, email lists, and other tools. You can customize your site - for free - far beyond what you could do with even a limited budget. There are hundreds of add-on modules that provide added functionality. Most of them are free, although there are commercial modules as well.

So if you want an extremely easy, fast, high-performance way to build your website, you couldn't go wrong installing Joomla and giving it a whirl.

Suzann Kale is a technical writer and copy editor. She helps edit http://www.Website-DoItYourself.com and has written many articles for science-oriented sites and hard copy magazines. She also runs a site on cosmetics and animal safety.