Publisher's Synopsis
One of the most difficult tasks you may find when you begin to explore Joomla is answering what seems like a simple question - "What is Joomla?" Let's try an analogy - imagine you're running an art gallery. Paintings and sketches adorn the walls and that is your content. People can come in and look at the paintings, and they can look at the paintings in any way they want. They can start right at the doorway and work their way around until they have completed the circuit. They can start at the back of the room and work their way forward. They can head straight to the first picture that catches their eye, and then to the next interesting picture, and so forth. Additionally, you can change things around - you can move the pictures to any part of the room, rearrange them, take some down. Or you can take down the pictures and redecorate the room, and then put those pictures up again exactly where they were. You can sell pictures and put new ones up to replace them. You can set up two galleries and put half of your pictures in each. Joomla gives you tools to manage your web content in the same way. In other words, Joomla is a package of software that you can host on your own computer, for development, or on a web server to deliver your web pages. It's a web-based program helping you to control and manipulate your data. You will create web text, called articles, and manage them through Joomla's Article Manager. You'll upload images and documents through the Media Manager. Then, using Joomla's many easy tools, you can assign those articles and media in any combination, to any page. Combine them, replace some, rearrange everything - it's easy! Joomla makes creating, updating and maintaining a website much simpler. Read on to find out how....
