What is Jhoomla and How Does it Work...

Joomla is one of the most popular free content management systems (CMS) in the world that allows you to easily create and manage a dynamic website and powerful online applications. It has an intuitive management interface to control all the features and functionality this powerful CMS possesses. Furthermore, there are hundreds of free extensions written for Joomla that allows users to extend its functionality and customize it to their own objectives. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

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 used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example: 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 is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques ans software design patterns, stores data in a MySQL, MS SQL or PostgreSQL database, and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization.

There are two key parts to a Joomla website, one controls how the site will look and the other the information that you see, the content. How a website looks is controlled by something called HTML, this is the language that your browser 'reads' - from this, your browser knows what colour to make the text, where to put a certain image, how far away one thing should be from another and a whole host of other things.

The content part of the site (the text) is delivered 'dynamically' from a database, which is seperate from the HTML part of the site. The database just stores plain, unformatted text, but allows the web page to connect to it, so when you look at a Joomla website page in a browser, the two are brought together and displayed - the HTML controlling how everything looks and the database providing the content. When you click a link to a new page, the HTML mostly stays the same, but the browser requests new content from the database, depending on which link you clicked.