About Joomla!

Joomla! An award winner!

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! Logo 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 intranets and extranets and is supported by a community of tens of thousands of users.

With a fully documented library of developer resources, Joomla! allows the customisation of every aspect of a Web site including presentation, layout, administration, and the rapid integration with third-party applications.

Thinking Web publishing? Think Joomla!

What languages are supported by Joomla! 1.5?

Currently supporting 50 world languages, Joomla speaks more languages than any other content management system. If your site users speak one language and your administrators another, you can customize your language settings to serve their needs—even on an individual user basis. Whether you speak French, Japanese, or Farsi, Joomla speaks your language.

Within the Installer you will find a wide collection of languages. The installer currently supports the following languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Bengali, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Devanagari(India), Croatian(Croatia), Magyar (Hungary), Italian, Malay, Norwegian bokmal, Dutch, Portuguese(Brasil), Portugues(Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Svenska, Thai and more are being added all the time.

By default the English language is installed for the Back and Front-ends. You can download additional language files from the Joomla!Extensions Directory.

What are the requirements to run Joomla!?

Joomla! 1.5 runs on the PHP pre-processor. PHP comes in many flavours, for a lot of operating systems. Beside PHP you will need a Web server. Joomla! is optimized for the Apache Web server, but it can run on different Web servers like Microsoft IIS it just requires additional configuration of PHP and MySQL. Joomla! also depends on a database, for this currently you can only use MySQL.

Many people know from their own experience that it's not easy to install an Apache Web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP, WAMP, and MAMP are easy to install distributions containing Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl for the Windows, Mac OSX and Linux operating systems. These packages are for localhost installations on non-public servers only.
The minimum version requirements for Joomla! 1.5 are:

Apache 1.x or 2.x
PHP 4.3 or up
MySQL 3.23 or up

For the latest minimum requirements details, see Joomla! Technical Requirements.

Joomla! Facts

Here are some interesting facts about Joomla!

Over 210,000 active registered Users on the Official Joomla! community forum and more on the many international community sites.
- over 1,000,000 posts in over 200,000 topics
- over 1,200 posts per day
- growing at 150 new participants each day!
1168 Projects on the JoomlaCode (joomlacode.org ). All for open source addons by third party developers.
- Well over 6,000,000 downloads of Joomla! since the migration to JoomlaCode in March 2007.
Nearly 4,000 extensions for Joomla! have been registered on the Joomla! Extension Directory
Joomla.org exceeds 2 TB of traffic per month!

Joomla! Overview

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!

Joomla! changes all that ...
Joomla! is different from the normal models for content management software. For a start, it's not complicated. Joomla! has been developed for everybody, and anybody can develop it further. It is designed to work (primarily) with other Open Source, free, software such as PHP, MySQL, and Apache.

It is easy to install and administer, and is reliable.

Joomla! doesn't even require the user or administrator of the system to know HTML to operate it once it's up and running.

To get the perfect Web site with all the functionality that you require for your particular application may take additional time and effort, but with the Joomla! Community support that is available and the many Third Party Developers actively creating and releasing new Extensions for the 1.5 platform on an almost daily basis, there is likely to be something out there to meet your needs. Or you could develop your own Extensions and make these available to the rest of the community.