Lets talk about JOOMLA
Why Joomla?
Joomla is one of the most widely used CMS in the world. The users love the simplicity of Joomla with its Powerful features. 1. Joomla bagged the award for the "Best Linux / Open Source Project " at UK Linux and Open Source Awards 2006, in London for second consecutive year. 2. Joomla bagged the award for the "Best PHP Open Source Content Management System" in 2007.

Every year there is an online voting/nomination which takes place on sites like http://www.packtpub.com. There is tough competition as sites built in different CMSs from around the globe are reviewed and tested. Joomla is the favourite to bag the award every year. People love to work in Joomla because its very simple and easy to create , configure and manage websites. A simple site with some content can be built within just 4-5 hours

What does a Joomla site consist?
A Joomla site is divided into the following:
1) Site Template: A fixed design template of the site with its CSS. This template has the position of the different modules you need to display on the site.
2) Components: Components are extensions to the Joomla site which gives us the power to expand and grow. Examples of components would be the user manager, etc. Components have their own administration area.
3) Modules: Modules are much easier and simpler than Components. They don't have any administration area as compared to components.
4) Content: Content is the data in form of pages, etc.
5) Plug-in/ Mambots: Mambots are kind of Joomla Robots.

Steps to build a JOOMLA Site:
1) The latest version of Joomla can be downloaded from http://joomla.org.
2) Then the Joomla package has to be installed in your site server with all the Database configuration, etc.
3) A Template for your Joomla site has to be created first.
4) Then the module positions needs to be assigned inside the template.
5) Creating or use different modules according to our requirements. Many other modules can be found on http://extensions.joomla.org.
6) Working on the different components that will be used in your Joomla Site

Component & Module Development in Joomla :
Components and Modules are the actual parts which brings the functionality to a Joomla Site. First we would look into the Component Development for a Joomla site. We know that Joomla is a CMS buit in PHP, MySQL database and XML. There are many components as well as modules available on the internet to download. Most of them are free but some are paid. Why paid ? Because the requirement could be very complex. It always depends on the requirement when starting to build a component. A easy hello_world component which displays a text "Hello World " on the frontend could take just 10 minutes to create.

Talking about the component we come accross the important aspect in component development is that the component can be used in different ways.

1) Backend Configuration - Displaying in the frontend
2) Frontend Configuration - Displaying in the Backend.
3) Using both the Backend as well as the Frontend.

Modules are the ones that can be assigned to content pages. Some modules are component specific. It means that the module accesses a specific part of the component to display it on the frontend. Module development also requires strong knowledge of PHP , MySQL adn XML.

...For more details Contact Us.