Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available.
What's a content management system (CMS)?
A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site, much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. 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.
What are some real world examples of what Joomla! can do?
Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:
- Corporate Web sites or portals
- Corporate intranets and extranets
- Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
- E-commerce and online reservations
- Government applications
- Small business Web sites
- Non-profit and organizational Web sites
- Community-based portals
- School and church Web sites
- Personal or family homepages
WordPress has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations. WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters that provide for proper formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes) are also included. WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article. Finally, WordPress has a rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install.
Zen Cart's default installation provides everything needed to maintain a shopping cart web site, however no warranty is given that the software fulfills its purpose. Products, pricing, shipping, newsletters, sales etc. are managed by the store owner through the administration area. The shopping cart is set up to receive payments from major credit cards and several payment gateway services are also provided.
The following is a list of some of the key features of Zen Cart as stated on their website:
- multiple language support
- multiple customer modes
- unlimited category depth
- multiple sales and discounts
- multiple display modes
- XHTML 1.0 compliant template system
- extra pages
- multiple ad banner controller
- multiple shipping options
- multiple payment options
- newsletter manager
- discount coupons
- gift certificates
- featured products
- quantity discounts
- phpBB integration through external module
Although Zencart improved the shop management and administration with the template system, still it suffers from the fact that editing core files for customizing is often required (no real modular structure). Therefore, in case of heavy customizing, the software is cumbersome to maintain and update. In a later branch of osCommerce, Batavi, this is solved by following an object oriented approach, and strict separation of the design, code and database layers.
