Joomla is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) which enables you to build professional and easy to manage Web sites. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular open source CMS currently available, as evidenced by a vibrant and growing community of friendly users and talented developers. Joomla's roots go back to 2000 and, with over 200,000 community users and contributors, the future looks bright for the award-winning Joomla Project.
Joomla is much more than just a powerful CMS; here is a list of some of the key features of Joomla:
The Media Manager is the tool for easily managing media files or folders and you can configure the MIME type settings to handle any type of file. The Media Manager is integrated into the Article Editor tool so you can grab images and other files at any time.
The Contact Manager helps your users to find the right person and their contact information. It also supports multiple contact forms going to specific individuals as well as groups.
Help navigate users to most popular search items and provide the admin with search statistics.
Joomla's simplified three-tiered system of articles makes organizing your content a snap. You can organize your content any way you want and not necessarily how it will be on your Web site. Your users can rate articles, e-mail them to a friend, or automatically save a PDF (with UTF-8 support for all languages). Administrators can archive content for safekeeping, hiding it from site visitors.
Creating content is simple with the WYSIWYG editor, giving even novice users the ability to combine text, images in an attractive way. Once you've created your articles, there are a number of pre-installed modules to show the most popular articles, latest new items, newsflashes, related articles, and more.
The Menu Manager allows you to create as many menus and menu items as you need. You can structure your menu hierarchy (and nested menu items) completely independent of your content structure.
Joomla allows for limited use of bulk emailing features. It allows sending of email newsletters to your contacts and tracks the open rate and click-through rate. Unlike CiviCRM, the information about your bulk emails is not fully integrated with all other system data, such as who donated as a result of the email, how much someone donated, etc.
Although not nearly as robust as CiviCRM, Joomla will allow for a basic page to be created with a donation button (a PayPal donate button for example, which directs a user to PayPal to complete their donation transaction). Without the CiviCRM integration, data about your donations will not be linked to contacts and tracked in the Joomla platform – this is an advanced feature which only comes with the CiviCRM integration in the Enhanced or Premium Monthly Subscriptions.
Joomla has a built-in help section to assist users with finding what they need. A glossary explains the terms in plain English, a version checker makes sure you're using the latest version, a system information tool helps you troubleshoot, and, if all else fails, links to a wealth of online resources for additional help and support.