Maybe you have already built websites the traditional way. That basically meant creating HTML documents—web pages—one by one. As the site grew, you'd end up with a bunch of HTML documents, trying to keep all of them organized and making sure all menu links stayed up-to-date. You'd probably maintain the site by yourself, because it was hard for other people to learn their way around the structure of your particular site, or be proficient in the web editing software you use.
Let's learn about the Holy Grail of web building: CMS! CMS is an application that runs on a web server. It allows you to develop and maintain a website online using a web browser. It comes packed with features, ranging from basic features to add and modify content to advanced functionality such as user registration or site search capability. In short, CMS makes it possible to build sites that would normally involve a full team of web professionals with a massive amount of time, money, and expertise at their disposal.
All that magic is made possible because CMS is really an advanced set of scripts (written in a scripting language such as PHP) that uses a database to store the content of your website. From that database, it retrieves bits and pieces of content and presents them as web pages.
This dynamic way of storing and presenting content makes CMS very flexible. Do you want to show only a selection of articles from a specific category on a page? Do you want to display only the intro texts of the most recent articles on the home page? Do you want to add a list of links to the most popular contents? Do you want to limit access to registered users? It's all possible—just pick the right settings. Additionally, CMS allows you to integrate all sorts of extra features, such as contact forms, picture galleries, and much more.
The best part is that such CMSes are yours to download and deploy today. You can pick your CMS of choice from a range of freely available open source products. Your new CMS-powered site can be online tomorrow. Now how's that for a great deal?
Note
What's open source software? The source code of this type of software is unlocked, unlike most software developed commercially. Everyone has access to the Joomla source code and software developers are encouraged to modify and help improve the software. The name Joomla stands for all together. It's as much a software product as it is an international community of people working together voluntarily to expand and improve that product. Most of the open source software is distributed free of charge, as is the case with Joomla and many of the extensions that have been developed for it. Some Joomla extensions are commercial—you have to pay for them. However, it's still open source (that is, you get access to the source code).
