The Joomla! Project

The Joomla! Project consists of all of the people who make and support the Joomla! Web Platform and Content Management System.

Our mission is to provide a flexible platform for digital publishing and collaboration.

The core values are:

• Freedom
• Equality
• Trust
• Community
• Collaboration
• Usability

In our vision, we see:

• People publishing and collaborating in their communities and around the world
• Software that is free, secure, and high-quality
• A community that is enjoyable and rewarding to participate in
• People around the world using their preferred languages
• A project that acts autonomously
• A project that is socially responsible
• A project dedicated to maintaining the trust of its users

There are millions of users around the world and thousands of people who contribute to the Joomla! Project. They work in three main groups: the Production Working Group, responsible for everything that goes into software and documentation; the Community Working Group, responsible for creating a nurturing the community; and Open Source Matters, the non profit organization responsible for managing legal, financial and organizational issues.

Joomla! is a free and open source project, which uses the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

Getting Help

There are lots of places you can get help with Joomla!.

In many places you will see the help icon [image]. Click on this for more information about the options and functions of items on your screen.

• Support Forums
• Documentation
• Professionals
• Books

The Joomla! Community

Joomla! means All Together, and it is a community of people all working and having fun together that makes Joomla! possible. Thousands of people each year participate in the Joomla! community, and we hope you will be one of them.

People with all kinds of skills, of all skill levels and from around the world are welcome to join in. Participate in the Joomla.org family of websites (the forum is a great place to start). Come to a Joomla! event. Join or start a Joomla! Users Group. Whether you are a developer, site administrator, designer, end user or fan, there are ways for you to participate and contribute.

News Feeds

News Feeds (com_newsfeeds) provides a way to organize and present news feeds. News feeds are a way that you present information from another site on your site. For example, the joomla.org website has numerous feeds that you an incorporate on your site. You an use menus to present a single feed, a list of feeds in a category, or or a list of all feed categories. Help

Joomla!

Congratulations! You have a Joomla! site! Joomla! makes your site easy to build a website just the way you want it and keep it simple to update and maintain.

Joomla! is a flexible and powerful platform, whether you are building a small site for yourself or a huge site with hundreds of thousands of visitors. Joomla is open source, which means you can make it work just the way you want it to.

Users

The users extension lets your site visitors register, login and logout, change their passwords and other information, and recover lost passwords. In the administrator it allows you to create, block and manage users and create user groups and access levels. Help

Please note that some of the user views will not display if you are not logged in to the site.

Getting Started

It's easy to get started creating your website. Knowing some of the basics will help.

What is a Content Management System?

A content management system is software that allows you to create and manage webpages easily by separating the creation of your content from the mechanics required to present it on the web.

In this site, the content is stored in a database. The look and feel are created by a template. The Joomla! software brings together the template and the content to create web pages.

Site and Administrator

Your site actually has two separate sites. The site (also called the front end) is what visitors to your site will see. The administrator (also called the back end) is only used by people managing your site. You can access the administrator by clicking the "Site Administrator" link on the "This Site" menu or by adding /administrator to the end of you domain name.

Log in to the administrator using the username and password created during the installation of Joomla!.

Logging in

To login to the front end of your site use the login form or the login menu link on the "This Site" menu. Use the user name an password that were created as part of the installation process. Once logged in you will be able to create and edit articles.

In managing your site, you will be able to create content that only logged in users are able to see.

Creating an article

Once you are logged in, a new menu will be visible. To create a new article, click on the "submit article" link on that menu.

The new article interface gives you a lot of options, but all you need to do is add a title an put something in the content area. To make it easy to find, set the state to published an put it in the Joomla! category.

Learn more

There is much more to learn about how to use Joomla! to create the web site you envision. You can learn much more at the Joomla! documentation site and on the Joomla! forums.

Weblinks

Weblinks (com_weblinks) is a component that provides a structured way to organize external links and present them in a visually attractive, consistent and informative way. Help