The CMS

Joomla! provides plenty of flexibility when displaying your Web content. Whether you are using Joomla! for a blog site, news or a Web site for a company, you'll find one or more content styles to showcase your information. You can also change the style of content dynamically depending on your preferences. Joomla! calls how a page is laid out a layout. Use the guide below to understand which layouts are available and how you might use them.
Joomla! is a free open source framework and content publishing system designed for quickly creating highly interactive multi-language Web sites, online communities, media portals, blogs and eCommerce applications.

Joomla! provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface that simplifies the management and publishing of large volumes of content including HTML, documents, and rich media. Joomla! is used by organisations of all sizes for Public Web sites, Intranets, and Extranets and is supported by a community of thousands of users.

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If you're new to Web publishing systems, you'll find that Joomla! delivers sophisticated solutions to your online needs. It can deliver a robust enterprise-level Web site, empowered by endless extensibility for your bespoke publishing needs. Moreover, it is often the system of choice for small business or home users who want a professional looking site that's simple to deploy and use. We do content right.

So what's the catch? How much does this system cost?

Well, there's good news ... and more good news! Joomla! 1.5 is free, it is released under an Open Source license - the GNU/General Public License v 2.0. Had you invested in a mainstream, commercial alternative, there'd be nothing but moths left in your wallet and to add new functionality would probably mean taking out a second mortgage each time you wanted something adding!

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Joomla! runs on any platform including Windows, most flavours of Linux, several Unix versions, and the Apple OS/X platform. Joomla! depends on PHP and the MySQL database to deliver dynamic content.

The minimum requirements are:

  • Apache 1.x, 2.x and higher
  • PHP 4.3 and higher
  • MySQL 3.23 and higher
It will also run on alternative server platforms such as Windows IIS - provided they support PHP and MySQL - but these require additional configuration in order for the Joomla! core package to be successful installed and operated.

Got a question? With more than 140,000 members, the online forums at forum.joomla.org are a great resource for both new and experienced users. Go ahead, ask your toughest questions, the community is waiting to see what you're going to do with your Joomla! site.

Do you want to show off your new Joomla! Web site? Go ahead, we have a section dedicated to that on our forum.

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Support

Support for the Joomla! CMS can be found on several places. The best place to start would be the official Help Site. Here you can help yourself to the information that is regularly published and updated as Joomla! develops. There is much more to come too!

Of course you should not forget the Help System of the CMS itself. On the topmenu in the Back-end Control panel you find the Help button which will provide you with lots of explanation on features.

Another great place would of course be the Forum . On the Joomla! Forum you can find help and support from Community members as well as from Joomla! Core members and Working Group members. The forum contains a lot of information, FAQ's, just about anything you are looking for in terms of support.

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