Joomla Introduction | What Is Joomla And Why We Should Use It? | Umais Blogs About Joomla #1

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For quite some time I am studying Joomla which is in fact one of the main platforms for building website, if you're interested in building your very own custom website, you will really enjoy this series.

What Is Joomla?

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Joomla is free and open source Content Management System (CMS) which is mostly used for publishing content online. A standard Joomla installation might be only thing you need to build a excellent site but it's really power comes from thousands of 3rd party extensions that are available. These extension extend the functionality of Joomla.

Benefits Of Joomla

You may not be convinced that Joomla is better than other platforms so here are some benefits that made me choose Joomla other than other platforms.

• First of all it is free. If you are developing low cost website you will definitely need low cost CMS and Joomla is perfect for that.
• It is open source and anyone can change and code it.
• It is cross platform. Since it is not located on your local machine you can use any operating system. For hosting it you can use host which runs Apache Server which is usually on Linux Hosting or Windows IOS, most of the Joomla site have Linux Hosting.
• Joomla have a extremely large user base which means you can have all your questions answered on Joomla's forums.
• There are many CMS Products available but most of them stop updating after some time and if you make wrong decision you'll be stuck with platform with outdated features. Joomla is around for much more time and is continuously improving you no need to worry.
• There are thousands of extensions which can make your work a lot easier, some of the examples include photo galleries, shopping cart and much more.
• Joomla is very secure.
• Joomla has a large amount of popularity, since 2006 Joomla has been download over 30 million times and is estimated to power 2.8% of all websites.
• As Joomla and most it;s extensions are open source it becomes very developer friendly. There are some additional feature that maybe point of interest for experienced developers, Joomla uses MVC Architecture, Object Oriented Programming and Joomla 3 incorporates bootstrap framework. 

Types of Sites You Can Make With Joomla

Joomla is perfect for almost all kinds of websites.

• Simple sites that have pages with text and images.
• Because of awesome extensions you can create specialist sites which include e-commerce, blogs, forums and magazine sites.
• If there's something you want to do but you can't do it neither does a extension exists to do that work, you can create custom applications.

Because Joomla is open source and free any developer can remove existing functionality and add new functionalities.

Benefits Of Using CMS

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As I mentioned before Joomla is Content Management System. Traditionally before sites were made on computer and then transferred to web host but CMS makes it easy for us by managing sites on host directly, it gives us a good  bunch of benefits. Some the benefits are:

• The website becomes easy to update because you just have to connect to back end which you can do using any browser.
• More than one person can update site, this makes it easy to manage sites.
• One of the most important aspect is that you can easily make design changes, you can just design once and it changes on whole site.
• You have full control over updates.

Joomla vs WordPress

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WordPress was originally a blogging platform, It used to have one or more articles from one or more author  but nowadays It is used in much more scenarios. Let's take a look at the interface.

You can see categories and all that but you can't see these options on all themes and to bring them back you have to deal with theme's coding which in fact is difficult for beginners but in the Joomla you could have easily control over them.

As you can see at right side there is sidebar, in WordPress it is showed in almost all pages but in Joomla you can choose by your own in which pages you want to show it.

In WordPress you can only sort posts by most recent to oldest one but in Joomla you can sort by alphabetical order, recent to oldest or any other custom orders.

Joomla may be a little harder to get your head around with than WordPress at first but it's worth it.

Requirements

You must have Web Host. If you have never website before it's good have basic understanding of how WWW works. Websites need a place to live in the internet, these homes tend to be high end computers running special hosting software. Technically you can do this by any internet connect computer but you'll need to spend a lot on hardware and software to do this properly so most don't use this method. Most of the websites live on servers operated by web host which is a organization that specializes in making website accessible on internet. Most of the web host may have all the necessary requirements.

Most Joomla sites run on servers powered by Linux operating system although it can be also run on Windows Servers. I recommend using Linux Servers for your website hosting. There are somethings that Joomla needs which is listed below

• Apache 2
• PHP 5.3.1
• MySQL 5.1

You don't need to know any of this is, just let your hosting provider know that you're going to build site on Joomla and need this specifications. These also don't cost much.

You also need Domain Name. It is a web address that you enter on your browser to access website. There are 100 hundreds of places to buy domain names but first of all check your hosting to see if they provide domain for free with hosting (most of hostings do!) even if they don't provide free try to get domain from same provider from which you got hosting.

Some Of Good Hosting Providers Are:

1. Bluehost
2. Ipage
3. Host Gator
4. Go Daddy

Installation

Most of hosting providers (including above ones) these days have automatic installation which only takes few minutes.

After buying hosting and domain, open Cpanel of your site which is your site's domain with "/cpanel" then login with username and password. After logging in you will see a option there. Something like this

You can easily install Joomla there.

Cya!

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