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This portion of the Boast Worthy Web Solutions website is served to you using the Joomla! Content Management System. Joomla! is just one of the popular, easy to install web content management systems available today.
Joomla! was born in August of 2005 as a result of a fork from the Mambo CMS project. The Joomla! development team created a website called Open Source Matters, which it uses to distribute information to developers, designers and the community in general. The OSM community was asked to choose a name for the new project they were looking to create, and on September 1, 2005, the project was given the name Joomla!, which is an English spelling of the Arabic word jumla, which means "all together". And on September 16, 2005 the maiden release of Joomla! (Joomla 1.0.0) was presented to the public.
In 2006 and 2007 Joomla! won the Packt Publishing Open source Content Management System Award. Also in October of 2008, PACKT announced that Johan Janssens received the "Most Valued Person" for his work as one of the lead developers of the Joomla! 1.5 Framework and Architecture. Then in 2009, Louis Landry received the MVP award for his role as Joomla! architect and development coordinator.
The current stable version of Joomla! (v1.5.15), and the second Alpha version of Joomla! 1.6 are available from the Joomla! website.
Source: Joomla! entry on Wikipedia.org
Built on PHP and MySQL
The Joomla! Application Framework is developed using PHP, a server-side HTML empbedded scripting language. The Joomla! application is a large collection of PHP scripts which operate to provide users an easy to administer and extend content management system. Due to the popularity of PHP there are several web frameworks and content management systems that utilize the language.
The Joomla! application data, as well as the user contributed content are stored in MySQL, a popular Open Source database engine. Many free (as in beer) software projects that require a full-featured database system often use MySQL. MySQL is also a part of what is known as the LAMP stack, which is Linux, Apache, MySQL and one (or more) of PHP, Perl, or Python. There are several high profile, large scale websites using MySQL, such as Wikipedia, Google and Facebook.
Joomla! Extensions
Another feature of Joomla! is the ability to easily extend the interface to include additional features. There are several ways to extend a Joomla! installation, including; Templates, Modules, Components, and Plugins. Each extension type has a different purpose, and a varying level of complexity, but there are hundreds of third party extensions available for download, and many are free.
Templates:: Joomla! templates are used to define the layout of the website content. A Joomla! template is a collection of PHP, XHTML, CSS and XML files which are combined to set up boundaries for the website content. A typical Joomla! template will define several Module positions as well as the Component (main page content) section of the web page.
Modules:: Joomla! modules are used to display user defined content within specific template positions. There are many customizable modules types included with the standard installation of Joomla! and hundreds more are available from third party developers.
Components:: Joomla! components are displayed to the user within the main content portion of the template. The text of this article, for instance, is being displayed to you using the Article Component of Joomla!. Components can be created to display a user profile, search results or even an eCommerce solution. You can download many free Joomla! components that were create by third party developers, to extend your Joomla! website's functionality.
Plugins:: Joomla! Plugins are used to modify or add to, the component content before it is displayed to the user. Plugins can display comment forms, article tags, user information or many other types of content to the end user. As with Templates, Modules and Components, you can find several Plugins available for download from third party developers.