Joomla! is a free, open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets. As a client of Osco Co., your web site is very like powered by Joomla! Here is a short list of features os a Joomla powered web site. It is by no means exhaustive, by sinmply to give you a brief overview.

• Organize your web content in a manageable way — Your content is a collection of articles, and they are arranged into categories and sections.
• Give you a simple way yo keep your content up-to-date — You can add or change your articles using a simple editor that work very much like your favourite word processor. You do not need to know a lot of technical stuff in order to update your web content.
• Flexible and consistant presentation — You have written very useful content, but you need an attrctive colour scheme and page layout. Joomla supports templates. You can create a new template and apply it to your site. All pages of you site will have a new look in a consistant way.
  
• Is extensible — Joomla is simple and flexible, yet it is extensible and powerful. When the time comes that you want to add new features, say a gallery or a forum. Joomla has a way to add plug-ins to enhanceitself. There are thousands of free plug-ins available.
• Has a large community — Joomla is probably the most popular open-source CMS. It has a large user community which means many people can share their experience with you. When you encounter difficulty in using Joomla, you have many people to ask for help. Joomla has a large developer community which means that there are many people working on fixing the problems and add new and useful features.
  

Organizing Content

The smallest piece of content you submit to Joomla! is known as an article. Each article must belong to a category. Joomla! groups related categories into a section.

For example, a school web site may has a section titled 'Grade 5' . This section may contain three categories, titled 'Arts', 'Reading', 'Field trips'. You can then put articles relating to the great field trips into the category 'Field trips'.

Showing Content

How an article is displayed on the web site depends on how the menus of the site is constructed. If you submit an article to the category 'Field trips' and there is a menu item linking to this category, clicking the menu item will bring you to a page listing all articles in this category.

A menu item can also link to a section. In this case, clicking the menu item will bring you to a page listing all articles in all categories in the section.

If an article is longer than a few sentences, Joomla! will show only the beginning of the article on the page. This portion of the article is known as the intro text. Joomla! will show a link with the word 'Read more ...' below the intro text of the article. Clicking this link will display the whole article.

In simple terms, open source software refers to the software whose underlying source code is available to the users and developers. Whoever is capable of changing the codes are allowed to change them, to further develop the software and to redistribute the original and modified versions of software.

Open source software does not equal to free software.