Joomla 101

"It's an extremely versatile and easy to use system. Adding a page to your website can truly be as simple as writing an e-mail."We use Joomla, an award winning content management system as the engine behind our township and local government websites. There are many benefits to using a CMS as opposed to a traditional static design. The most important difference between the two is that with a CMS, all the content of the website is stored in a database as opposed to saved in static files. With a database driven site, we can make sweeping changes to the site (restructuring a menu, moving items around on a page) without the time-consuming work of going through every page of a website and applying the same changes over and over again. With a database driven site we can make one change and apply it site wide with the click of a button. Everything that saves us time saves you money.

Some of the other advantages to using a content management system such as Joomla are found in the ease with which a user can add new content to the site. Using a CMS, all of the content of your website can be created and modified using a simple web-based interface. It's an extremely versatile and easy to use system. Adding a page to your website can truly be as simple as writing an e-mail. Again, regardless of who is handling the day to day management of your website, every way we can find to save time is directly translated into an immediate cost savings to our clients. The third (and arguably most important) reason that we've chosen Joomla as our software of choice for our township sites is it's extensibility. With Joomla's plugin and extension repository we can expand upon the core software to customize your website in virtually any way you want. Need a calendar to keep residents informed of important dates? Install a calendar plugin! Want to pull feeds from a local news site to give your users a reason to check back frequently? Install a news feed module! Joomla is packed full of extension options that will do everything from keep track of your stocks to sell your real estate. At the time of this writing there are almost 5,000 different extensions available on their site for download.

So why Joomla? Why not one of the other content management systems out there? For starters, Joomla is open source. The development community has full access to the code. There are many benefits to this which are covered in greater detail in our article on why we prefer to work with open source software, but the long and short of it is that with open access to the code we get more updates faster, people are more readily able to contribute extensions, and security flaws are found more quickly. The second reason we use Joomla is because it's 100% free. There is no additional cost to us for using Joomla to build your website. As a result, we don't pass that cost onto you. Outside of core features, access to the source code and the fact that it's free, we also like to know who else is using a specific piece of software before we make a decision about it. If a division of the United Nations, the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences or IHOP aren't enough for you, perhaps we'll go a step further and look at Joomla's overall popularity when compared with some of it's closest competition. A quick search on Google Trends shows us that Joomla really does stand out amongst it's neighbors.

If none of this has convinced you, take a look around this site. Everything you read and interact with right here was created with the latest version of Joomla. We've got plenty of articles explaining things in more detail throughout, several modules to show off some of it's dynamic functionality, and a guided tour series to show you around the back end. We think you're likely to come to the same conclusion we did. When you need a modern site with lots of functionality, and you need to be able to update it without a college degree in computer engineering, Joomla is among the best choices you could possibly make.