Out of the (virtual) box, Joomla provides all the basic features needed to create a website that can be managed day to day by non-technical content contributors. It helps remove the webmaster bottleneck by providing an easy-to-use, browser-based way to add and edit content and pages using a word processor style interface. Users can control elements such as navigation menus and page layout and have the ability to add unlimited sections to the website.

Basic content management features are included in the core such as:

• Categorizing content
• Archiving content
• "Most read" and "latest" content
• Search
• Sections (ability to limit access to content based on user permissions)
• Publish content to an RSS feed

The core features are powerful enough to create an intranet portal. As with many open source applications the real power lies in the insane amount of additional functionality offered by extensions. There are currently several extensions available for Intranet and Groupware type applications: capabilities such as contacts, LDAP integration, CRM, and project/task management. Of course if the extensions available through Joomla don't meet your needs, your in-house developers can use the Joomla API to build your own.

Joomla supports multiple languages so this is helpful to companies with the need for multilingual support.

With the release of version 1.5 Joomla adopts an MVC model as the basis of its three-tiered system which follows an object-oriented pattern-based methodology and design pattern. The distinct framework, application, and extension tiers enable rapid prototyping and great extensibility.

Joomla is a cross-platform application and is written in PHP (version 4 and 5 support) and uses a mySQL backend.

Next: Getting Started »