The Joomla! CMS is a free, award-winning content management system written in PHP which allows users to easily publish their content on the world wide web and intranets. Joomla! is created as an open-source project where individuals and teams contribute their skills to its development as well as its supporting systems.
While Joomla! is packed with features, its greatest quality is that it is extremely extensible. Because of its extensible structure, there aren't many things you cannot do with Joomla!. A short list of some important features of Joomla! are the following:
With traditional website design, there is a bottleneck whereby the webmaster must enter all the content into the site. In a large organization, it's possible to have designated contributors each with web editing software like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, but the costs add up, and each person must be trained to work with HTML. The larger the group of contributors, the higher the cost. Speaking from experience, a couple of incorrect keystrokes can ruin a website. One poorly trained contributor can make a huge mess.
Joomla! Templates help to reduce the stress on both web designers and Joomla! users by giving Joomla! powered web sites the "look and feel" using XHTML and CSS thus separating logic from presentation. This allows the user to take complete control over the web site's entire presentation.
With Joomla! a template is set up by the developer, the owner/administrator can give permission to others who would simply need internet access to log in and enter content on their own schedule. There are tools build in to the back end to customize the look and feel of the page, much like you would use in creating a Word document. The administrator can allow others to publish directly, or have it approved first.