Joomla! is the #1 Web Content Management System useful for building high end websites and intranets for publishing contents such as news flashes, blogs, polls, search within the website and language i18n. Joomla! is a 100% free open source CMS and works on PHP preferably MySQL as the database.

The Joomla package consists of many different parts, which allow modular extensions and integrations to be made easily. An example of such are extensions called "Plugins". Plugins are background extensions that extend Joomla with new functionality. The WikiBot, for example, allows the author of Joomla content to use "Wikitags" in Joomla articles which will auto-create dynamic hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles when displayed. There are over 3,500 extensions for Joomla available via the Extensions Directory.

In addition to Plugins, more comprehensive extensions are available. "Components" allow webmasters to perform such tasks as build a community by expanding user features, backup a website, translate content and create URLs that are more friendly to search engines or even create a directory or classified. "Modules" perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc., to be inserted within the base Joomla code.

Since Joomla 1.0 has been around longer, there are more extensions available for it than for Joomla 1.5, although native 1.5 extensions are becoming increasingly available now. Some of the older 1.0 extensions can be configured with version 1.5 while turning ON the legacy mode.

Joomla permits administrators to set global configuration parameters that affect every article. Every page conforms to these parameters by default, but a page can have its own setting for each parameter. For example, you can elect to show or hide the article author or simply go with the global "show author" parameter.

Major features of the Joomla! CMS are:

	User Management at different levels
	Language internationalization
	Page caching for fast and improved performance
	RSS feeds
	Generate printable versions of pages and even email them
	Internal website search
	Search Engine Friendly URLs