Joomla - Free CMS
A website built on Joomla is great for those who want to easily edit content and manage their website. It is available free - see http://www.joomla.org.
Joomla was the 2006 Open Source Content Management System Award Winner! It is available free because it is open source. And basically a content management system allows YOU to manage the content on your website.
There is a great community of people who develop and share components for Joomla which can easily be plugged into your website.
The easiest way to set up Joomla is to:
- Sign up for a hosting server with Fantastico (which is a tool that does automatic Joomla installation) like Hostgator.
- Once you install Joomla (extremely easy from the server's control panel) you can purchase and install a Professional Joomla template.
- You will need to add content and set up the links and menus within joomla.
- You can then download and install additional extensions as per your requirements (such as the ones mentioned below) from http://extensions.joomla.org/
Some of the useful components available are:
-
Performs - Allows you to build forms with the fields you want on your website.
-
Letterman Newsletter - collect email addresses on your website and send newsletters out.
-
Joomlaboard - A discussion forum where your website visitors can interact.
-
Pollxt - Create polls and surveys on your website. This extends the poll component already available within Joomla.
- Community builder - this allows you to build a network of people on your website. They can make contact with each other and meet more people through their contacts