What is Joomla?

"Joom-what?" you say. Joomla is a an open-source, content management system. Still confused? That's okay, this is a question many clients ask me as I talk about Joomla a lot. Joomla is a swahili word meaning "all together." It is an international software project developed and supported by thousands of people around the world.

Joomla is the main method that Landau Design uses to build websites. It's a content management system, which means the site is managed by a database. The database stores all your contents in its tables, much like a filing cabinet stores information in drawers and folders. Your website does not exist in pages, it exists in the database. A template, or design, is created for your site, and every time a person clicks on a link in your site, the database feeds up the data into the template and presents the page. This is known as dynamic content generation because the content is not presented as a page until somebody interacts with it.

Joomla is open-source software, which means the developers who work on the program donate their time, and the software is given away for free. Why would they do this? Often an open-source project is begun when developers feel they can create a comprable project to commercial software. Once the project gets going, and its a success, the developers involved are often recruited for other work, which is the benefit they get out of volunteering their time. The popular browser Firefox, made by Mozilla, is another example of an open-source project.

Joomla is an excellent resource for creating websites. Not only do the sites go up twice as fast, but there are literally thousands of mini-programs, called extensions, which can be integrated into Joomla without requiring any programming knowledge. The sites are generated using CSS (cascading style sheets), which means almost any design can be converted into Joomla. In addition, our clients who are willing can be easily trained to maintain the site contents. Joomla not only saves money in site development costs, but also gives the client control of their site.