Joomla 1.1 intro overview

After awhile I got to realise, that the power of the comunity working on both the core and extensions is even a bigger advantage. You can find over 3 thousands of joomla extensions, most of them free.

Now  that I got into extensions and php coding, I see that the ease of extending Joomla yourself is the what kept me using Joomla as my favourite CMS.

Other advantages:

Supports multiple encodings and languages

Multiple wysiwyg editors

Full support of search engine friendly (SEF) urls

Native and extendable caching support

Easy templating system

Easy understandable php coding standards 

Downsides

As everything else, it has it's down sides. As it is much wide spread and known, it will always be the target of the attacks. The Joomla team responds very quickly to all security alerts and the updates are made from the admin.

Joomla makes huge ammounts (within dozens per page) of database queries. This can become a problem on loaded sites. Caching can prevent this behaviour to major extent.

Even though joomla is somewhat intuitive, if you don't get into reading, it will get some time until you get fully comfortable with it.

Menu design in the template may not be compatible if the html menu has background images or a complicated css layout.

Not every extension is usable for your case, but this is a natural limitation of every cms if you dont't want to recode the extension.

Rigid content philosophy of section and category hierarchy.

Overview

Joomla 1.1 is almost fully compatible branch of mambo cms. It is fully modular, extremely customizable and stable.
It's design is split in the front-end and backend parts. You can customize both of them, even though the backend philosophy is set tight.

Front-end:
This is mainly the templating system. You can use multiple templates, create your own templates, change the css. This gives you the full power over the looks of your site with as few limitations as possible. As the matter of fact I designed a couple of dozens joomla powered sites and was allways able to transform the template html (both css and table design) into 1:1 joomla powered template copy.
Joomla allows front-end content editing, which comes in handy when you have a site that integrates user feedback.

Back-end:
Every item (menu, component, module, mambot, content item, section, category) can be quickly unpublished and reordered in the backend.

Locking mechanism is implemented in every operation, so that multiple users can work at the same time in the back-end.

  The backend menu is split into:

site configuration
        Supports numerous front/back end languages and encodings. Full UTF-8 support. Allows site     maintenance mode.

content management
    Menus

         You can create unlimited menu items including submenus. Every menu can be configured to link certain type of object (component, category list, content item, external link, part of a component, module etc.). Menus are placed on a page by adding a module call to the template. Then you have to configure the module at the site modules admin page as a menu module and place it on the position specified in the template module call.

    Menu called mainmenu is somewhat special. The first item of this menu is the homepage of your site.

   Sections/Categories
        Joomla has a native section/category hierarchy. Every content item has to belong in exactly 1 section and 1 category.
        The section is parent of multiple categories and every category can have only 1 parent section. This can be somewhat extended, but you will be most propably stuck with this philosophy or will have to use an extension that will change this native behaviour.
        You can address all categories and sections from the admin to display list of corresponding items.
       
        You can chose if you wish to display the category and/or section the content item belongs to at every level (menu item/extension/content item/global) as a plain text or a link.

        The section/category mechanism impacts the inner design of your site, but when you get used to it, you will be able to design the layout very quickly for sites of all sizes.
       

    Static content/Content items
        Static content is as it name suggests used for pages that will never or rarely change. These items are usualy not displayed in the category/section listings and can be omitted at menu item/extension level.

Components

    Components are extensions used to display the core content of the site. They are usualy configurable and sometimes serve as more granular configuration for modules/mambots extending the specific component.
    Every component can have own configuration. The authors tend to respect certain standards, but some options are extension specific and you will have to gather certain ammount of information before successfully installing and configuring the extensions.

Modules

    Modules are used to display smaller chunks of data. The main configuration regarding modules is their positioning and order within a specific position. Modules can include some standrad and even specific parameters, but usualy are less complex than component. If more complexicity is neccessary, they use component configuration option as a backend.

Mambots / Plugins

    Mambots also called plugins are extensions used to process the html output of the joomla engine before it gets sent to the user. They are configured to start processing the output for certain menu items, users or content items and are triggered by specific text in the output. One of the most basic mambot is that will replace the occurence of the string with corresponding image tag defined in the content item parameters page.

Templates

    You can install front-end and back-end joomla templates.

extension installation

    Install components, modules and mambots/plugins. Usualy all extensions start with a prefix defining the type of extension: com_, mod_, bot_ (rarely used). Sometimes this standard is not respected. The best place to start is then the install components menu item.


Joomla supports acl and groups and is customizable also what regards authentication and autorisation mechanisms.

 Conclusion