by Hatem A.Mowgoud

Created on: May 05, 2009   Last Updated: May 07, 2009

CMS is short for Content Management System. CMS is a web portal that has a user-friendly control panel that enables you to edit your website data and organize it inside the browser, without any scripting.

One from the most famous and known CMSs is Joomla. Joomla is a CMS that allow developers to develop extensions (plug-ins & scripts) to improve Joomla; so you have many developers around the world trying to produce new improvements and options to Joomla every day.

The most wonderful thing about Joomla is the templates; you can download millions of templates from different sites, paid or free. So with a little bit of search over Google you'll find the template that suits your website, and there are all kinds of templates on the web.

And if you want to make your unique template, customized exactly like you want, you can but this will need some experience as you'll need to know some HTML & CSS to modify an existing template or you can start a template from scratch.

Joomla comes with many features that I think will impress and satisfy any one who tries it for the first time. Joomla enables you to set more than one user to edit your website data and log into the control panel, and with the different privileges you set, each user will only edit the section or the category you want him to, and that's great because if you are running a school website for instance, you get each teacher to edit his class or activity section only.

Another great feature of Joomla is that you can allow guests to register and have password protected accounts in the website, and then you can easily send a monthly newsletter to all your website users, or simply just tell them that the website is active.

You can also embed your pictures or your last video in an article in just one click, and later you'll know that Joomla can easily be turned to a media gallery.

Polls is a powerful tool to know what your website's frequent users think about your website, and a nice way to interact with your customers if you're running a business through your website; Joomla have added the polls features to their default features that come with the system. You can easily create polls and organize which poll to appear in which page, then you can view the detailed results of it.

Developers have added more than 4325 Joomla extensions in the Joomla extension directory till now (May 3, 2009), and they're adding more extensions everyday.

In the next lines you'll find some of the most important features available in the Joomla extension directory.

One of the most powerful features added to the Joomla CMS by developers is adding comments. There are many plug-ins like "Jom Comments" or "ChronoComments" where you allow your website visitors to add comments on each article, post or new video, and you can also limit adding comments to registered users only to avoid scams.

Adding a gallery is an important thing to have in your website. If you're running a business through your website you'll want to show your products to the website users in a neat organized way, or if you are planning to make a personal website, simply create albums for your latest vacation pictures. I personally think the most functional plug-in for this feature is "MorfeoShow".

And that's only a brief about Joomla; if you want to know more about Joomla, check the Joomla website.

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