Building a Big and Powerful Website Using Joomla!

Joomla! is a powerful content management software. If you intend to create a professional, big and powerful website, try Joomla! Moreover, it is an open source software and is readily available to be downloaded on their main website (http://joomla.org). Please take note that this is not an easy software to master and you will be required to do some research in their forum (http://forum.joomla.org) in order to get more info. It took me approximately 6 hours to master this software. And trust me, it is worth it!

Joomla! provides a method for you to professionally run and manage your website contents. It also gives you the choice to place your own advertisements throughout the site. The feature that captured my attention most was placing Adsense was remarkably easy! All you need to do is to add a module through clicking the Installer button found on top and subsequently select the Adsense zip file that you have saved on your hard drive and install it. To add Adsense to your website, simply click on the 'Modules' link found on top and add a new site module. Place the Adsense in whichever location you desire. More Joomla! extensions can be found at http://extensions.joomla.org.

Joomla! also enables multiple authors to participate in your website. You can invite your friends to participate by registering a username and password for them to log in. Once logged in, create a column for them so that they can have their own personal column to place their articles.

Changing the layout in Joomla! is also very easy. Simply download a theme/template that is available at Joomla!'s website and install it through the 'Installers' function.

Joomla! can be further expanded into building a huge community. Try installing Community Builder which is readily available in Joomla!'s official website. This component enables you to create a community where the community can chat, look at the member's profile and there is even a blogging tool for them to use.

However, Joomla! does not function well with some of the browsers. For example, if you are using Mozilla Firefox, the image resizing function does not function at all. As for Internet Explorer, the program sometime hangs while loading the typing/editing tools - even though you click reload multiple times. This also happened in Opera. On the other hand, Opera is the best browser to open your site running on Joomla!, compared to IE and Firefox.

As a conclusion, for those who has the ambition to build a community website similar to Friendster or Multiply, you can definitely use Joomla! to achieve your goal. And for those who want a simple yet powerful blogging platform, you should definitely give Joomla! a try.