Joomla is a free, open source CMS created by Open Source Matters, Inc. for the publication of web content. It is based on a Model-View-Controller (MVC) web application framework, which can be used independently of the CMS. Joomla was founded on August 17, 2005, as a result of a Mambo fork.

Joomla has thousands of extensions and templates and a lot of them are available free of charge. Some of Joomla's features include the following:

• It is multilingual.
• It provides out-of-the-box Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and is Search Engine Friendly (SEF).
• It is free to use under a General Public License (GPL).
• It has access control lists that allow you to manage the users of a website, as well as different groups.
• It has menu management, so as many menus and menu items as required can be created.

Now that we have covered a short introduction to Joomla, let's look at its architecture to dive a little deeper into the software.