Joomla is a content management system.The term "Content management system" simply means that you can use Joomla to edit and manage the content on your website.

The official name for Joomla! comes from a Swahili word meaning "All together" or "As a whole".

There is a large worldwide community of people working with and developing Joomla. As of July 2008, there are 200,000 registered users at the official Joomla site.

In 2008 a new version of Joomla, 1.5, was released. [Help identify which version of Joomla you have]

The United Nations European website http://www.unric.org is on Joomla.

Joomla is a large framework designed to support small and large websites.

In the back-end of the site, information is stored in content items. There are two types of content items:

1. Content Items (also called Articles) organised into in Sections and Categories, and

2. Static Content Items (Only in Joomla 1.0)

Sections and Categories are mostly for organising large amounts of pages in the back end. There are some other uses.

Content items are only displayed in a Menu system if a Menu link has been created that links to the content item (ie after the page has been created).

(Note: It is also possible to set up a Menu link - Blog style - that links to an overview of every page in a category. In that instance, simply creating a content item in the correct category will put it into the link).

The menu system is very powerful, allowing you to link directly to a page on your site, to any other website address (URL), simply putting in a placeholder and many more features.

Your website can also have many plug-ins, such as shopping carts and form builders.

The process to create a new page and put it onto a menu is as follows:

1. Create the page
2. Put it into the menu that you want it to be on

There are many additional plug-in components for Joomla.

In addition, Butterfly Internet specialises in creating custom components for unique solutions.

The Joomla Extensions directory lists 4,420 extensions as of February 2009.