Amongst the 50+ Open Source Content Management Systems, popularly known as open source CMS, based on the PHP platform and MySQL Database, Joomla! is one of the most successful and popular CMS systems. Undoubtedly occupying the position amongst the top three most sought CMS systems, Joomla! is convincingly a versatile CMS system. Standing tall, in almost all the charts, Joomla!, according to the Gartner Report, has second highest average weekly download. It is most commonly used CMS system.
Joomla! has one of the highest groups of developers, community, Forums and other resources that assist the programmers and developer community as a whole for their various technical problems and software development needs. Joomla! has a huge base of modules and components that act as Add Ons for various functionalities or in other words the Plug inns. In most of the cases, the commonly needed features like events, calendars, blogs, photogallery, news and now even the social networking sites are available through these ready to use modules and plug-inns.
Joomla! customization would essentially mean altering the core base modules and components which already exist with standard Joomla! editions. There could be the following possibilities while looking at the Joomla! customization:
Joomla! template customization
Joomla! core or standard code customization
Joomla! modules and components customization
Joomla! plug-inns customization
In case, if the specific needs of the functionality are not met with the available standard open source codes of the Joomla! plug-inns or modules, then altogether new module or plug-inn can be developed and integrated with standard Joomla! CMS.
Owing to this rich flexibility and highly adaptable feature of customization, Joomla! has been popularly used for creating different types of websites and web application like Government websites, NGO websites, Church websites, small business websites, online publication websites, corporate websites, E- commerce websites, educational websites, personal websites, portals etc.