Here are some interesting facts about Joomla!

• Over 140,000 active registered Users on the Official Joomla! community forum and more on the many international community sites.
  • over 1,000,000 posts in over 200,000 topics
  • over 1,200 posts per day
  • growing at 150 new participants each day!
• 1168 Projects on the JoomlaCode (joomlacode.org ). All for open source addons by third party developers.
  • Nearly 1,900,000 downloads of Joomla! since the migration to JoomlaCode in March 2007.
    
• 2200+ Extensions for Joomla! have been registered on the Joomla! Extension Directory
• Joomla.org exceeds 2 TB of traffic per month!
• Alexa report [November 2007]: Joomla.org at #690 of the busiest Web sites in the world.

Support

Support for the Joomla! CMS can be found on several places. The best place to start would be the official Help Site. Here you can help yourself to the information that is regularly published and updated as Joomla! develops. There is much more to come too!

Of course you should not forget the Help System of the CMS itself. On the topmenu in the Back-end Control panel you find the Help button which will provide you with lots of explanation on features.

Another great place would of course be the Forum . On the Joomla! Forum you can find help and support from Community members as well as from Joomla! Core members and Working Group members. The forum contains a lot of information, FAQ's, just about anything you are looking for in terms of support.

Two other resources for Support are the Joomla! Developer Network (JDN) and the Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED). The Developer Network for example provides lots of technical information for the experienced Developer as well as those new to Joomla! and development work in general. The JED whilst not a support site in the strictest sense has many of the Extensions that you will need as you develop your own Web site.

The Joomla! Core members are regularly posting their blog reports about several topics such as programming techniques used in Joomla!, Security, Events and more. You can even subscribe to get notified by e-mail when a new blog post is made!

Documentation

Joomla! Documentation can of course be found on the Help Site. You can find information such as an Installation Guide, User and Administrator manuals, Frequently Asked Questions and a lot more. The User Documentation Team are the guardians of the documentation relating to the practical use of Joomla!. The Developer Documentation Team are the stalwarts behind detailing how Joomla! works from the ground up and how you can develop your own Extensions and Templates and much more.

Other than the documentation provided by the Joomla! Documentation Work Groups there are also books written about Joomla! You can find a listing of these books in the Joomla! Bookshelf.

Want to help?

If you want to help in the documentation project for Joomla! then please post your details on the User Documentation Forum or the Developer Documentation Forum

Got a question? With more than 140,000 members, the online forums at forum.joomla.org are a great resource for both new and experienced users. Go ahead, ask your toughest questions, the community is waiting to see what you're going to do with your Joomla! site.

Do you want to show off your new Joomla! Web site? Go ahead, we have a section dedicated to that on our forum.

Do you want to join in?

If you think working with Joomla! is fun, wait until you start working on it. We're passionate about helping Joomla! Users make the jump to becoming contributing members of the community, so there are many ways you can help Joomla!'s development:

• Submit news about Joomla!. We syndicate all Joomla! related news on our news portal. If you have some Joomla! news that you would like to share with the community, please submit your short story, article, announcement or review here.
• Report bugs and request features in our trackers. Please read Reporting Bugs, for details on how we like our bug reports served up
• Submit patches for new and/or fixed behaviour. Please read Submitting Patches, for details on how to submit a patch.
• Join the developer forums and share your ideas for how to improve Joomla!. We're always open to suggestions, although we're likely to be sceptical of large-scale suggestions without some code to back it up.
• Join any of the Joomla! Working Groups and bring your personal expertise to the Joomla! community. More info about the different working groups can be found on the Working Group Roll Call.

That's all you need to know if you'd like to join the Joomla! development community.

If you're new to Web publishing systems, you'll find that Joomla! delivers sophisticated solutions to your online needs. It can deliver a robust enterprise-level Web site, empowered by endless extensibility for your bespoke publishing needs. Moreover, it is often the system of choice for small business or home users who want a professional looking site that's simple to deploy and use. We do content right.

So what's the catch? How much does this system cost?

Well, there's good news ... and more good news! Joomla! 1.5 is free, it is released under an Open Source license - the GNU/General Public License v 2.0. Had you invested in a mainstream, commercial alternative, there'd be nothing but moths left in your wallet and to add new functionality would probably mean taking out a second mortgage each time you wanted something adding!

Joomla! changes all that ...
Joomla! is different from the normal models for content management software. For a start, it's not complicated. Joomla! has been developed for everybody, and anybody can develop it further. It is designed to work (primarily) with other Open Source, free, software such as PHP, MySQL, and Apache.

It is easy to install and administer, and is reliable.

Joomla! doesn't even require the user or administrator of the system to know HTML to operate it once it's up and running.

To get the perfect Web site with all the functionality that you require for your particular application may take additional time and effort, but with the Joomla! Community support that is available and the many Third Party Developers actively creating and releasing new Extensions for the 1.5 platform on an almost daily basis, there is likely to be something out there to meet your needs. Or you could develop your own Extensions and make these available to the rest of the community.

This Web site is powered by Joomla! The software and default templates on which it runs are Copyright 2005-2007 Open Source Matters. All other content and data, including data entered into this Web site and templates added after installation, are copyrighted by their respective copyright owners.

If you want to distribute, copy, or modify Joomla!, you are welcome to do so under the terms of the GNU General Public License. If you are unfamiliar with this license, you might want to read 'How To Apply These Terms To Your Program' and the 'GNU General Public License FAQ'.

Joomla! documentation is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License 2.5 or by the specific license of their respective copyright owners.

The Joomla! licence has always been GPL.