Joomla Overview

Joomla is an extremely flexible and dynamic content management framework that is supported by a devoted and vibrant community. As with all of the systems we use, Joomla code and structure is "open source" which means that the core code is freely available and open to modification to anyone who understands how it is constructed.

As with the WordPress system, a Joomla site can be maintained via a browser based interface and draws "page" content from a database via php code (that translates content into HTML). This interface is very straightforward and should look and feel fairly familiar to anyone who is comfortable using any of the popular word processing programs. Content is defined and attached to "section" and "category" groups which allow structural divisions, these structural divisions can in turn be used to sort content in a variety of different ways.

"Page" content can be presented as individual page destinations or collections of presorted entries that are presented in several different ways. Content can also be configured to be "published" (ie: made visible) and "unpublished" (ie: made invisible) by given date parameters. In addition content can be made visible only to logged in site visitors who satisfy a preordained set of defined "privilages".

Unlike WordPress, a Joomla site can feature different navigation arrays from section to section, and can feature multiple styling templates within the site.

Joomla Extensions

The Joomla core core includes a vast range of capabilities that are quite comprehensive. However the beauty of an open source system that encourages development participation is that there are new components being authored all of the time.

Layout Configurations

Joomla uses dynamic interplay with the source database to offer a wide variety of layout configurations. Besides allowing for most hand coding capabilities within the structure of a given article "page", a link defined site destination can be defined by any of the following:

• Single Article
• Blog Style Layout defined by section
• Blog Style Layout defined by category
• List Style Layout defined by section
• List Style Layout defined by category
• News feed array
• Web links array
• User list array
• Poll