Joomla!

A little history of the Web...

Back in the early eighties, ENQUIRE was first proposed by physicist Tim Berners-Lee as a system for physicists to transmit documents which later because the World Wide Web, according to Wikipedia. Just like the Internet itself, this creation would eventually become huge and accepted world wide. The Internet was originally a tool for research, but because of it's incredible usefulness, and become a huge communications medium.

HTML is limited

HTML was originally designed to be simple so that anyone could write a document in HTML. It was simple and portable, but lacked layout and aesthetics. HTML doesn't lay out the graphics of a document, nor does it draw anything, instead it describes how the page should look. It's up the the browser to finally draw the graphics. As in, "This text should stand out as a header," or, "This is a paragraph." HTML does not say, "Color these pixels this way." HTML had limitations, but successive versions added more functionality.

HTML did not necessarily define pages in a series, nor arrange it's pages in a hierarchy, all that was up to the designer who would use links to the various pages, placed conspicuously as a menu in all his pages as he pleased. Various hacks were used to control the layout such as using tables for layouts. Various wysiwygs were developed that would work like a word processor to create pages and used templates to create entire sites. They generated all the HTML pages which were then uploaded onto a webserver and then the page was available.

Dynamic HTML

These pages however were not dynamic pages and were usually pretty boring. Hackers developed a framework for generating dynamic HTML called PHP, which stands for Hypertext Pre-Processing. PHP could replace a wysiwyg editor entirely, or PHP code could be inserted into the HTML pages themselves. Now those pages were read by the PHP engine and whatever they said, the engine would do. Thus the site became dynamic.

Joomla! The dynamic HTML engine

Joomla! was created in August 2005 as a fork of Mambo, another content management system. Joomla! takes the dynamic HTML concept one step further from dynamic HTML and creates a self-editing website, a portal for users to easily update content, and extend functionality with minimal technical expertise. Joomla! brings website management down to a user level where only a minimal amount of training is necessary to maintain the website. Finally, a website that is truly maintainable and sufficient.