Building Website with Joomla!

Before you can understand how to operate Joomla!, allow me to explain the basic principles that
underlie the Joomla! Content Management System. Content Management System (CMS)
contains the terms content and management (administration) that imprecisely refer only to a
system that administers content. Such a system could be a board and a piece of chalk (menu or
school chalkboard), or it could be something like Wikipedia (the free online encyclopedia at
http://www.wikipedia.org
), or an online auction house such as eBay (
http://www.ebay.com/
).
In all these cases, content is administered; at times even for a large number of participants as in the
case of the last two examples. These participants play a major role with the CMS, on one hand as
the administrators, and on the other hand as users.
In general, the term content management is used in connection with web pages that can be
maintained by a browser. This doesn't necessarily make the definition any easier. Apart from
CMSs there are Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP, administration of corporate data),
Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM, care of customer contacts), Document
Management Systems (DMS, administration of documents), Human Resource Management
Systems (HRM, administration of staffing), and many others. An operating system such as
Windows or Linux also administers content.
Joomla! belongs to the category of Web Content Management Systems (WCMS), since it
exclusively administers content on a web server.
It is difficult to define the term CMS because of its encompassing nature and variety of functions.
Lately ECMS has established itself as the nickname for Enterprise Content Management
Systems. The other systems listed above are subsets of ECMS.