Joomla! Basics
Powerful CMS capable of creating large, heavily trafficked sites.
Straightforward CMS that fits a wide range of needs.
Small learning curve – a beginner designer could get a site up and running quickly.
How Joomla! Works
The default structure has three tiers to it: sections, categories, and articles:
Sections: Top level structural elements that contain categories and articles.
Categories: Organizational mechanism that helps give additional meaning and structure to content.
Articles: The actual content. When content is placed in the system, it is associated with categories.
This structure is a little easier to visualize if you think of sections as a file cabinet, categories as folders inside the cabinet, and articles as pieces of paper in the folder. For more complex sites, this rigid structure can make some tasks more difficult than you’d like.
The most recent release of Joomla! allows you to merge sections and categories, which should give you a little bit more flexibility when needing to display related content.
Once the content has been structured, pages within the site are built using Joomla’s menu system. This is another concept that can be a little confusing at first.
To add content to the site, you create a new menu item, associate that with a menu item type, which can be anything from custom pages like a contact page or a blog layout, to an individual article of content.
Now, that might seem a little backwards at first, it becomes pretty straightforward as you work with the platform.
The page layout and customization is handled through templates. A Joomla! template is a mixture of static HTML that controls layout, modules that add functionality like menus, search boxes, or other functional plug-ins, and a content component. Although templates can have as many modules as you’d like, you can only have one component per page.
Components hold the main areas of content on the page, and they can be anything from a single article, to a blog or a message board.
Joomla! Modules
Much like Drupal, Joomla! Has a huge feature set that is further extended by modules (or extensions).
Joomla! has a fairly robust roles and permissions, with nine built-in user groups and extensions that let you have even more granular control over those roles and permissions.
Joomla! also has a media manager that assists in managing images and any other file type that you need on your site. It also supports multiple sites and has multilingual support, although it isn’t as powerful as some of the other systems.
One of the more interesting features of Joomla! is that every install also contains a Moodle installation, meaning that in addition to its powerful content management tools, you can also handle complex e-learning tasks.
Best Site for Joomla!
You can build almost any site you can imagine using Joomla!… From large sites and heavy traffic just fine to simple informational sites.
Site with complicated relationship can be difficult to build in Joomla!, but for the most part any site can be built using Joomla!.
The development community surrounding Joomla! is also a quite strong, and there is a huge amount of modules available to extend at Joomla’s core feature sets.
Joomla! might not be quite as flexible as Drupal, but the platform makes up for that by being easier to set up and and administer. One draw back compared to Drupal is the templating system which can be restrictive and hard to update.
If you want to learn more about the Joomla! community and the CMS itself, visit the following resources:
Joomla.org
Documents
Training
Download
Requirements
Installation
Terminology