What is Joomla?

If you really want to create your own website with full capabilities and also easy to manage and also easy to develop, you can choose Joomla as the most popular free content management system to help you create your own site, develop and mantain it.
This easiness including any functionality you can think of, you can found the functionality add-in you need scattered around the internet for freely or you can even write or create your own add-in functionality that you need.

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html

Joomla™ is a free content management system used to create websites. Joomla™ allows web designers to construct sites by combining modules, and requires no knowledge of programming to use. Joomla™'s framework is written in PHP, as are the modules used to customize websites. There is a wide variety of modules available, including RSS feeds, polls, and language internationalization, which make it easy for Joomla™ users to publish content to the web, even with minimal web design experience. Joomla™ can also be used to publish information on intranets, making it a useful organizational tool.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-joomla.htm

What is joomla and what well learn....

Joomla! is a Content Management System and is for a start not complicated. Joomla makes it easy for non-technical people to create professional and dynamic websites.
Because it has been developed with the masses in mind. You do not need any programming knowledge such as HTML or PHP to use Joomla for web creation. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable. Using Joomla! is like using a word-processing program.

Within minutes, you can add the following features:
1. Polls
2. User Registration
3. Simple Contact Forms
4. News feeds
5. Photo Galleries
6. built-in search functionality
7. Content Rating Systems
8. Forums
8. Blogs
9. Tagging
and many more

It will set you back tens of thousands of rands if a web designer should create the above features.
There are over 3000 extensions which will provide all sorts of functionality and features for your website.
You just plug it in and configure it.

Organization will be in control of their websites; different people will be able to contribute content, the design of the site can be changed in minutes using Joomla!

In a nutshell, you can set up a fully-fledged website in one day, if you have the content.

What Will Be Covered?

- Creating a local webserver using LAMP
- Running the Joomla Installation Wizard
- The frontend and the backend of a Joomla-powered website
- Organising your content
- Creating sections, categories and content articles
- Creating menu items
- The Front Page component
- Installing Joomla extensions
- Inserting images into content
- Managing content through the frontend and backend
- Joomla templates
- Uploading the website to a web hosting service (company).
- and more…