Joomla! is an award-winning, easy to use and extensible software project that aims to deliver an open source CMS (Content Management System) solution to users who are bored with their regular content management systems and want to try something different. It is built using the PHP and MySQL web technologies, and it can be used to deploy powerful websites to your clients, as well as to build astonishing web apps.
What can I do with Joomla!
With Joomla!, you will be able to create corporate websites and portals, community-based portals, corporate extranets and intranets, websites for non-profit organizations, family or personal homepages, websites for churches and schools, online reservation systems, e-commerce websites, publications, online magazines, government applications, newspapers, as well as websites for small and medium-sized businesses.
Who uses Joomla?
At the moment, Joomla! is used by numerous well known organizations, institutions and major companies around the world, including the social networking website of MTV Networks, Harvard University, Outdoor Photographer magazine, IHOP restaurants, Citibank, The Green Maven, PlayShakespeare and Senso Interiors furniture designer.
Powerful tools for developers
Besides all the end-user features revealed above, Joomla! also comes with powerful tools for developers, allowing them to create sophisticated plugins that will extend Joomla’s default functionality. These include inventory control systems, communication tools, integrated e-commerce systems, application bridges, reservation systems, data reporting tools, complex business directories and custom product catalogs.
Under the hood and supported OSes
As mentioned, Joomla! is written entirely in the PHP server-side scripting language and uses the award-winning and powerful MySQL database server for storing its data. Being designed as a web-based application, Joomla! runs on top of a web server (e.g. Apache) and it is independent of a computer OS. Of course, this means that you can use it through a supported and modern web browser on GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and any other operating system.
