Joomla is a content management system that is free to use. It is open source software licensed under General Public Licence (GPL); anyone can use it as they choose. Joomla is a professional and robust system and building websites with Joomla is a choice that an increasing number of people are making the decision to do.
There is a vibrant community that has built up around Joomla. Developers build templates to suit any project. Some are offered for sale, but many are available free. Free Joomla templates are not necessarily inferior in quality. In fact, some of the best templates you will find are free, and that is the great thing about Joomla community; they share freely with each other.
Joomla has a birth date. It is August 17th 2005, though it was not until September 1st that the name Joomla was actually announced. Joomla 1.0.0, the first release of the software, was on September 16th and it was actually Mambo 4.5.2.3 in a re-branded package. However, it went on to win the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award the following year in 2006, and again in 2007.
Building great websites with Joomla using free Joomla templates is really very easy, even though the software does have a reputation of being difficult to learn. There are plenty of tutorials around to help anyone who wants to discover how to plug into the power of Joomla, and the official Joomla forum has close to one and a half million posts on it. There’s plenty of free information available on just about everything to do with Joomla.
The Joomla content management system works by having the ability to increase the basic power of the software through adding modules that extend its reach. These modules, known as plugins, integrate fully with the basic software. They can add usefulness to a website in the form of a calendar, a forum, a user poll, a blog, and many other features commonly found on today’s increasingly interactive websites.
While making websites with Joomla usually means creating the larger portal type of web site, small personal web sites can easily be built too. Joomla has considerable power and the software is extremely robust. This makes it ideally suitable for the serious professional website, but as already mentioned, any size of website can be built with Joomla.
Although the same basic software makes every Joomla website, it is the template that makes each one look distinctive. There are many, many thousands of Joomla templates available from thousands of websites. While you can purchase a template specially coded, and therefore unique to you, you don’t have to.
A recent search on a major search engine returned almost a million results for the phrase, “free Joomla templates”. Consider that each website in the results is likely to have dozens of templates and you can see that there is one somewhere out there that is ideal for you without costing you a penny.
Making websites with Joomla is not only easy, but low cost too. The software is extremely robust and as good as it gets. Finding a template is not only easy, but hard to avoid. There really is no reason why anyone should not be creating websites with Joomla.
