Managing even a medium-sized Web site can be a real headache. The webmaster was tired of manually managing content, updating news, and keeping track of old items, so we added a Content Management System -- software that makes it easy to handle the mundane administrative duties of a Web site. A good CMS lets you divide the task of posting content among many relatively unskilled people. The Joomla CMS is designed to handle the largest of Web sites, and, in my experience on this site so far, it does so admirably.
The toughest part of using Joomla is the installation and the conversion of the content from the old web site - a process that is still not completed entirely. I won't go into the details of the installation here; there is ample documentation on their Web site.
In fact, Joomla is targeted at the corporate market. All content pages are dynamically generated from a MySQL database.
The look of a Web site running on Joomla is defined by a template. There are two parts to Joomla. The front end is the Web site itself -- what visitors see. The back end is where you go to make changes to the site. The back end is complex, and has many features. The good thing about Joomla is that you do not need to visit the back end often. You update content from the main page of the front end.
To handle content management, Joomla has five categories of user. A public user can view only some of the content on Web site. A registered user can view all the content. An author can add content. Editors can add content and edit other authors' work. A publisher can add content and approve content for publication. This access control system makes it easy to define users. .
The back end handles the general configuration of the Web site. You can define the look of the site, add RSS syndicated news, access visitor statistics, add newsflashes, mass mail your registered users, and manage any advertisements you may have. You can add additional capabilities to Joomla by downloading components from the Internet.
Joomla allows you to set automatic publishing and expiration dates on your content. This means that you do not have to worry about content staying up after it's outdated. Simply define the dates on which it should be visible, and Joomla handles the rest.
Joomla uses the concept of sections, categories, and items to organize your content. Sections are containers that hold one or more categories. Categories are containers that hold one or more items, which are the articles that make up your site content. For example, if you were running a technology Web site, you might have a section called Reviews, containing categories such as Hardware and Software. Within the Hardware category, you could store items relating to that category, such as Motherboards or Video Cards.
When you add a new article to your Web site, you assign the article (or item) to a category, and the category to a section.
