We use one of the most flexible and powerful content management systems currently available - Joomla.  Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to manage your website, page content and graphics easily. There are many reasons, including its ease-of-use and extendability, that have made Joomla the most popular web site software available.

What's a content management system (CMS)?

A content management system is online software that works within your web hosting space and manages every piece of content on your Web site.  Content can be simple text, photos, or just about anything you can think of. The major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage, and because it manages all your content, you don't have to.

What are some real world examples of what Joomla! can do?

Joomla is used all globally to power web sites of all shapes and sizes, here are some examples of how Joomla is used: -

• 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

Features Overview

Joomla is much more than just a powerful content management system. Here is a list of some of the features you get to start with, but there are literally thousands of different components, plugins and modules you can add to your site to extend it's capabilities.

Creating content is simple with the online WYSIWYG editor, giving even novice users the ability to combine text and 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, e.g. latest new items, newsflashes, related articles, and more.

User Management

If you want to build a community or a membership site - there is a registration system built in that allows users to register, login and configure personal options.

Media Manager

The Media Manager is the tool for easily managing media files or folders. The Media Manager is an integrated part of the Article Editor tool, so you can grab images and other files at any time and put them in your pages.

Banner Management

It's easy to set up banners on your web site using the Banner Manager. Once you add as many banners as you need, you can set impression numbers, special URLs, and more.

Contact Management

The Contact Manager helps your web site users contact the right person. It also supports multiple contact forms going to specific individuals as well as to groups.

Polls

If you want to find out more about your users, it's easy to create polls with multiple options.  (Polls are currently available in Joomla 1.5, but may not continue to be available in future versions of Joomla)

Search

Help your web site users navigate to most popular search items.

Web Link Management

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

Content Management

The simplified system for articles makes organizing your content a snap. You can organize your content any way you want. Your users can rate articles, e-mail them to a friend, or automatically save a PDF of the page content. Site managers can archive content for safekeeping, hiding it from site visitors.

The built-in e-mail cloaking protects email addresses from spambots.

Other features include: -

• Syndication and Newsfeed Management
• Menu Manager
• Integrated Help System
• Private Messaging System
• Plugins and Modules are available which add extra functionality to your site

In fact this system gives you everything that you need to make your site functional, easy to use, and easy to manage, it is packed with features as standard and it's easy to add more features and functionality via Modules and Plugins. There is nothing to install on your computer, everything is online within your web space and you access the administration area via a secure login page from any internet connected PC.