Joomla is one of the most popular Content  Management Systems available. Spawned from the Mambo CMS, Joomla offers non technical folks the ability to add content and manage their own website without the need for a programmer.  You can with little ease create a wonderful looking website with tons of functionality. Joomla has a password protected administration area for the site administrator to handle all the tasks at hand with easy to use web browser based control panels and editors.

Joomla requires a web server running PHP and a MySQL database. This can be linux or windows. Our choice is a LAMP environment (Linux Apache MySQL PHP).  There are hosting companies that offer packages with Joomla already installed. You can choose to do your own install or hire a developer to handle that part to get you started. The advantage there being the developer can install a custom template that may be beyond the ability of a non programmer.

Once everything is set up the site owner can add pages, menus, blog entries, galleries of images, well you name it. With close to 5,000 free Open Source components, modules and mambots there is so much you can add. If you visit Joomla.org you can find out more. If you visit JED, or the Joomla Extensions Directory you can browse all the add ons. This include our JoomlaDo iPhone and iPod touch modules along with or sister Moolets Mootools based modules. 

You will find may of your friends may be using Wordpress . This is our favorite blogging system. However we would not build out a robust business system on Wordpress as the framework as not as accommodating for such things, like member based sub applications. Many business sites these days are starting to resemble Social Networking sites in as the members can have accounts, areas of the content they moderate and have a nice avatar and so on. No option for this in WP.

Joomla is built for this by simply installing their Community Builder component. Create a fully crowdsourced member portal with Joomla, Community Builder and JoomlaDo for Apple Mobile

 Click here to read more on Community Builder.