Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

What are some real world examples of what Joomla! can do?

Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:
Corporate Web sites or portals
Corporate intranets and extranets
Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
E-commerce and online reservations
Government applications
Small business Web sites
Non-profit and organizational Web sites
Community-based portals
School and church Web sites
Personal or family homepages

Joomla! is a free and open source content management system (CMS) for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets. It comprises a model–view–controller (MVC) Web application framework that can also be used independently.

Joomla is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and software design patterns, stores data in a MySQL database, and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization.

Within its first year of release, Joomla had been downloaded 2.5 million times. There are over 6,000 free and commercial plug-ins available from the official Joomla! Extension Directory and more available from other sources.

Deployment

Joomla can be installed manually from source code on a system running a web server which supports PHP applications, from a package management system or using a TurnKey Joomla appliance which comprises the application and its dependencies as a ready-to-use system.

There are numerous web hosting companies who provide a control panel which automates the deployment of a basic Joomla web site.

Joomla can also be installed via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer which installs the software on Windows and IIS. The Web PI will automatically detect any missing dependencies such as PHP or MySQL then install and configure them before installing Joomla.