What is a content management system (CMS)?

A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your website. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don't have to.

Novare Web Design uses a variety of award winning content management systems to develop, dynamic and functional websites for its clients.

Joomla

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to easily update your website content.Many aspects of the Joomla CMS, most notably its ease of use and extensibility have made Joomla the most popular web development tool available.

Joomla also offers so much more than just a powerful content management system.



Standard Joomla features include;

User Management
Joomla has a registration system that allows users to configure personal options. There are nine user groups with various types of permissions on what users are allowed to access, edit, publish and administrate.Authentication is an important part of user management and Joomla support multiple protocols, including LDAP, OpenID, and even Gmail. This allows users to use their existing account information to streamline the registration process.

Media Manager
The Media Manager is the tool for easily managing media files or folders and you can configure the MIME type settings to handle any type of file. The Media Manager is integrated into the Article Editor tool so you can grab images and other files at any time.

Language Manager
There is international support for many world languages and UTF-8 encoding. If you need your Web site in one language and the administrator panel in another, multiple languages are possible.

Banner Management
It's easy to set up banners on your Web site using the Banner Manager, starting with creating a client profile. Once you add campaigns and as many banners as you need, you can set impression numbers, special URLs, and more.

Contact Management
The Contact Manager helps your users to find the right person and their contact information. It also supports multiple contact forms going to specific individuals as well as groups.

Polls
If you want to find out more about your users, it's easy to create polls with multiple options.

Search
Help navigate users to most popular search items and provide the admin with search statistics.

Web Link Management
Providing link resources for site users is simple and you can sort them into categories, even count every click.

Content Management
Joomla's simplified three-tiered system of articles makes organizing your content a snap. You can organize your content any way you want and not necessarily how it will be on your Web site. Your users can rate articles, e-mail them to a friend, or automatically save a PDF (with UTF-8 support for all languages). Administrators can archive content for safekeeping, hiding it from site visitors. On public Web sites, built-in e-mail cloaking protects email addresses from spambots. Creating content is simple with the WYSIWYG editor, giving even novice users the ability to combine text, images in an attractive way. Once you've created your articles, there are a number of pre-installed modules to show the most popular articles, latest new items, newsflashes, related articles, and more.

Syndication and Newsfeed Management
With Joomla, it's easy to syndicate your site content, allowing your users to subscribe to new content in their favorite RSS reader. It's equally easy to integrate RSS feeds from other sources and aggregate them all on your site.

Menu Manager
The Menu Manager allows you to create as many menus and menu items as you need. You can structure your menu hierarchy (and nested menu items) completely independent of your content structure. Put one menu in multiple places and in any style you want; use rollovers, dropdown, flyouts and just about any other navigation system you can think of. Also automatic breadcrumbs are generated to help navigate your site users.

Template Management
Templates in Joomla are a powerful way to make your site look exactly the way you want and either use a single template for the entire site or a separate template for each site section. The level of visual control goes a step further with powerful template overrides, allowing you to customize each part of your pages.

Integrated Help System
Joomla has a built-in help section to assist users with finding what they need. A glossary explains the terms in plain English, a version checker makes sure you're using the latest version, a system information tool helps you troubleshoot, and, if all else fails, links to a wealth of online resources for additional help and support.

Powerful Extensibility
Joomla also offers a powerful application framework that makes it easy to create sophisticated add-ons that extend the power of Joomla into virtually unlimited directions.

Here are some of the fantastic web applications available to add functionality to your website.

Dynamic form builders
Business or organizational directories
Document management
Image and multimedia galleries
E-commerce and shopping cart engines
Forums and chat software
Calendars
Blogging software
Directory services
Email newsletters
Data collection and reporting tools
Banner advertising systems

You can find many more examples of these Joomla applications listed in the web applications section.