Joomla is the most popular open source content management system or CMS in short.

For those that are not familiar with CMS, it is a system that manages every single piece of content that your have uploaded onto your web site. It is widely being used for content publishing on both the Internet as well as intranets. Features such as RSS feed, blog, polls and page caching just to name a few make Joomla a popular choice for webmasters.

Joomla comes from an Arabic word jumla which means "all together" or "as a whole" (source). Joomla consists of modular extensions and additional extensions will extend its functionality, similar to WordPress' plugins. As of 2008, there are over 3,500 different extensions available for Joolma in the Extensions Directory. Since Joomla is open source, anyone can contribute to writing new extensions for the system or have your own person set of unique extensions just for your web site.

Here are the core features:
- user management
- media manager
- language manager
- banner management
- contact management
- polls
- search
- web link management
- content management
- syndication and newsfeed management
- menu manager
- template management
- integrated help system
- system features
- web services
- powerful extensibility (from the Extensions Directory)

For more information about Joomla, visit the official Joomla web site. If you are interested and curious to know what Joomla can do, take a look at The Joomla 1.5 Demo Web Site.