Joomla is free and it's a popular open source content management system. Joomla can be described as a very simple and quick way to create professional websites for beginners with absolutely no knowledge on programming. It can be downloaded for free and anyone can begin working on their website immediately. Anyone can create a professional website with a Joomla template and a hosting account to host the website. Using Joomla a website with discussion forums, picture or video galleries, blogs, articles etc can be created within a few days without any programming.
If there is a feature such as forum or a gallery that is not available in Joomla by default then just by installing the required Joomla plugin or component anyone can add any advanced feature to their site within a few seconds without writing a single line of code. Some of the components or plugins are free while some of them have to be bought. But most of the plugins and components are very cheap.
A very important point that has to be kept in mind when selecting a Joomla template is the browser compatibility of the template. This is a very common problem with all these free Joomla templates available on the internet, since most of them are not fully compatible with either Firefox, Google Chrome or Internet Explorer 8. So if a template that is not compatible with a certain browser is used then the website can look totally different or even certain menu's or other items might be missing for a user using that particular browser.
At the moment the most widely used internet browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, and Google Chrome. Therefore it is important to use a Joomla template that is compatible with these 3 browsers since they are being used by majority of the users. Since most free templates are not compatible with all major internet browsers it is better to buy a template that is fully compatible with all these browsers. At the moment the latest version of Joomla is 1.5.20 which was released in July 2010. A beta version of Joomla 1.6 has been made available for testing. Joomla is a great way for new webmasters and affiliates to easily get started with a website since it requires no knowledge on HTML, PHP or any other programming language.
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