Joomla is a free to use content management system. It is open source software licensed under the General Public License (GPL); anyone can use it however they want. Joomla is a professional and robust system and creating websites with Joomla is a choice that more and more people are making the decision to make.
There is a vibrant community that has been built around Joomla. Developers create templates to fit any project. Some are offered for sale, but many are available for free. Free Joomla templates are not necessarily inferior in quality. In fact, some of the best templates you’ll find are free, and that’s the best thing about the Joomla community; share freely with each other.
Joomla has a birth date. It is August 17, 2005, although it wasn’t until September 1 that the Joomla name was announced. Joomla 1.0.0, the first release of the software, was on September 16 and was actually Mambo 4.5.2.3 in a renamed package. However, it did win the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award the following year in 2006 and again in 2007.
Creating great websites with Joomla using free Joomla templates is actually very easy, although the software has a reputation for being difficult to learn. There are plenty of tutorials to help anyone who wants to figure out how to connect with the power of Joomla, and the official Joomla forum has close to a million and a half posts about it. There is a lot of free information available on almost everything related to Joomla.
Joomla’s content management system works by having the ability to increase the basic power of the software by adding modules that extend its reach. These modules, known as plugins, fully integrate with the core software. They can add utility to a website in the form of a calendar, forum, user poll, blog, and many other features commonly found on today’s increasingly interactive websites.
While building websites with Joomla usually means building a larger portal type website, small personal websites can be easily created as well. Joomla has considerable power and the software is extremely robust. This makes it ideal for the serious professional website, but as already mentioned, any size website can be built with Joomla.
Although the same basic software makes every Joomla website, it’s the template that makes each one look distinctive. There are many, many thousands of Joomla templates available on 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 nearly a million results for the phrase “free Joomla templates.” Consider that every website in the results is likely to have dozens of templates and you can see that there is one somewhere that is ideal for you without costing you a dime.
Making websites with Joomla is not only easy but also low cost. The software is extremely robust and as good as it gets. Finding a template is not only easy, but also hard to avoid. There really is no reason why someone shouldn’t build websites with Joomla.