Joomla!

Joomla is a free and open source content management system (CMS) for publishing content on the Web and intranets. It comprises a model–view–controller (MVC) Web application framework that can also be used independently.

Joomla is written in Object-oriented PHP, and uses software design patterns, stores data in a MySQL, and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalisation (i18n).

Within its first year of release, Joomla was downloaded 2.5 million times. Over 6,000 free and commercial plug-ins are available.

Installation

I found installation to be very straight forward, simply unpack the downloadable zip into a web-accessible location on the server making sure that it is writeable by the web-server, then navigate to that location to go through the install procedure. It allows the use of a table prefix so that it can be installed into existing MySQL databases along with other applications such as Wordpress or MediaWiki.

One confusing part of the installation was that it asked for FTP details to the Joomla directory. This would have made installation a difficulty so I tried moving forward without supplying the information, and it seems to have installed properly.

A useful feature of the Joomla installation is that it allows the newly set up site to be optionally populated with sample data to help Joomla-noobs get started.

Skinning

• BestOfJoomla - Joomla templates site (filter by compatibility and license)
• [http://www.siteground.com/joomla-hosting/joomla15-templates.htm Free Joomla1.5 templates from SiteGround
• Joomla templates from Joomla24

See also

• Our test Joomla installation
• Official Joomla site
• Joomla documentation wiki - a MediaWiki - not a particularly good sign in my opinion :-/
• Joomla tutorial from SiteGround