Joomla is a web application that makes it easy for groups of people to build a website.

In fact Joomla is so easy to use that it is a good tool for even a single individual to use when building a web site.

Applications like Joomla are called "Content Management Systems" (CMS). You can read more about CMS at Wikipedia .

Two of the other more popular CMS applications are Plone and Drupal . Joomla is probably the easiest to use and best supported of the more popular CMS applications.

If you have a website and want to be able to change the content of that site easily and / or frequently, Joomla could be a good choice for you. With Joomla, you can log in to the site and edit the site directly in your browser. You can add new pages and these pages will automatically be added to all navigation.

If you want more than one person to be able to edit the site you can give logins to other people, and set permissions as to whether they can post new content or just submit it for review by you.

Joomla is very easy to install. You must first install a mysql database, which is easy to do with most hosting providers, such as pair.com or GoDaddy.com . You then simply unpack and upload the Joomla files to your server, and step through some simple instruction screens.

One of the reasons for the popularity of Joomla is that in addition to making a it easy to edit your site, it is easy to make your site look nice. The appearance of Joomla pages are set by means of Joomla templates. There are many templates available, and they are easy to install.

Here are a few sites that offer Joomla templates that you can use on your site. Take a minute to browse through some of these to see the kinds of designs that are available to you with a few mouse clicks:

• Rocket Themes
• Joomla Designs
• 4Templates

The other big advantage of using Joomla to build your website is that there are lot of open source components that you can plug in to your site to give it just about any functionality that you want. For example:

• Newsletter
• Auto Generated Site Map
• Search Engine Friendly Urls, that is, "my-cool-page.htm" instead of "option/3/5/component"
• Embedded blog (Wordpress)
• Comments - Allow readers to add comments to your articles
• Events Calendar
• RSS Syndication - generate an RSS feed for your site.
• RSS import - read RSS feeds into your site
• Form Builder: create forms that users fill out; the forms then get stored in a database
• Hierarchical DHTML menus

Here is an example of a real site built with Joomla : JSL - Japanese websites for US companies

In terms of visual design this site is fairly simple but it does use quite a few components. This company is a Las Vegas company providing Japanese translation and website design for American companies looking to sell to Japan over the web.

JSL provides on its site a number of resources, including a Yen Converter for converting yen amounts to dollars and vice versa, and a tool for converting all yen values to dollar values on a web page , in addition to articles, a link directory, a bookstore, a calendar for Japanese holidays and more. The Yen Converter and some other resources were not built with Joomla, but Joomla makes it easy to incorporate these.

Resources created by Joomla modules on this site include

• Links
• Japan Bookstore (automatically creates proper link for your Amazon affiliate ID)
• Japan Calendar
• Japanese Translation Request Form

The hierarchical menu is a Joomla component that makes it easy to put a lot of resources into the menu.

Note that some of the article pages have Google Adsense added on the side. Joomla makes it easy to add Adsense or any other blocks of content to particular sets of pages. You simply paste the content in the appropriate block and assign that block to a category of pages.

Example Site  #2: Consejos Para Todo

This is a very simple site, offering a number of articles and tips on various topics in Spanish, such as travel and health tips. However, even for such a simple site, it is easy to see the benefits in using Joomla over creating this as static HTML pages.

One feature of the site is that there is a menu of articles in the middle of the main page and on the left. This menu reads:

Bajar De Peso Corazon Dolor De Cabeza Resaca Dejar de Roncar Dieta Para Adelgazar Perfume De Mujer Cuidado De La Piel Escoger Abogado Vuelos Charter Impotencia Casino En Línea Casino Consejos Viajar

Example site #3: Park Wellness Center

This is a site for integrative health center, including acupuncture and other holistic therapies.

Joomla is an advantage for this site because the site has sections for different practioners. Each practioner can add their own content. The site administrator has editorial control over the content.

This site also has a blog and an article section both of which are updated frequently.

Finally a look at just how easy it is to edit a Joomla site. Here we are going to log in to the JSL site.

(Note: This picture is best viewed in Internet Explorer, which has a special component for shrinking pictures like this one. This screenshot is of a 800 x 600 screen).

Here's the login screen. We'll login as admin.

We return to the home page. The big red arrow is pointing to an "edit" icon. If we click this, we'll be able to directly edit the text on the site.

Here we have clicked on the edit icon (and scrolled down a bit). You can see that there is

1. a WYSIWYG editor right in the page, with the text that we can edit
2. a Save icon we can click on to save our changes.

So, installation is easy, and editing content is easy. But what about overall setup, choosing the menus and components that you want and arranging them and then adding new content? This can be a bit more involved, but once you understand the principles of Joomla, you'll find that is both simple and powerful.

Read on in this series as we build a new Joomla site from scratch.