If you’ve been following the tech scene in Pune, you’d be aware of the tremendous success of PHPCamp Pune with over a 1000 registrants. One thing that quickly became clear during PHPCamp is the interest in having special interest groups for more specialized areas within PHP hacking – specifically Open Social, Drupal and Joomla!. To help you stay in touch, we asked Amit Kumar Singh, one of the primary movers behind PHPCamp, and behind the Joomla Users Group, India to give our readers an overview of Joomla! – what it is, and why is it so popular. This article is intentionally low-tech at our request – to give people just an quick overview of Joomla! If you want more details, especially technical deep dives, head over to Amit’s blog where he often has articles about Joomla!

Have you ever wondered how you can quickly build a website for yourself or your organization? If yes, then read on to find how you can do so.

What is Joomla!

Joomla! is a open source, content management system( CMS), written in PHP, licensed under GPL and managed by OSM Foundation .

Joomla is the English spelling of the Swahili word jumla meaning “all together” or “as a whole”.  You can read more about history of Joomla at wikipedia.

Well, in one word, secret to build websites quickly and easily is Joomla!. It takes the pain out of building and maintaining websites. It is designed and build to make managing websites easier for a layman.

Where to use

It can be used to build

• Personal Websites
• Company’s Website
• Small Business Websites
• NGO Websites
• Online magazines and publications websites
• School and colleges Websites

This is basically list of things that can be done with Joomla out of box.  Some of the core features of Joomla are

• Article management
• User registration and contacts
• Themes
• Search
• Polling
• Language support
• Messaging
• News Feeds and advertisement

If you need more, then you can easily extend Joomla to do lot more things and even use the framework to build some powerful applications. For example if you want to add additional fields to user registration form you can use community builder, if you want to put e-commerce shopping cart you can use vituemart, if you want to add forum you can use fireboard.

You can also see how others are using Joomla at Joomla sites showcase forum.

How to Extend

For me the best part of using Joomla is that it is very easy to customize and enhance. You can find extensions for your needs by simply looking in JED, just in case your need is really very unique then you can extend Joomla to suit your specific needs by writing simple components and modules.

If you get stuck while building something you can always find help from very active and helpful community members either at main Joomla Forum site or at Joomla User Group Pune.

About the Author – Amit Kumar Singh

Amit works as Technical Architect at Pune It Labs Pvt Ltd. He considers himself as a jack-of-all-trades related to technology, and trying to master PHP. Along with others he has started Joomla! Users Group Pune and is am part of un/organisers for PHPcamp, barcamp pune, opensocial developer garge, Joomladay. He has also created opensource plugins for Joomla, wordpress, jquery.