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.

What's a content management system (CMS)?

A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site, much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don't have to.

What are some real world examples of what Joomla! can do?

Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:

• Corporate Web sites or portals
• Corporate intranets and extranets
• Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
• E-commerce and online reservations
• Government applications
• Small business Web sites
• Non-profit and organizational Web sites
• Community-based portals
• School and church Web sites
• Personal or family homepages

MySQL is the world's most popular open source database software, with over 100 million copies of its software downloaded or distributed throughout it's history. With its superior speed, reliability, and ease of use, MySQL has become the preferred choice for Web, Web 2.0, SaaS, ISV, Telecom companies and forward-thinking corporate IT Managers because it eliminates the major problems associated with downtime, maintenance and administration for modern, online applications.

Many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, critical business systems, and packaged software — including industry leaders such as Yahoo!, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, Nokia, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Booking.com.

The flagship MySQL offering is MySQL Enterprise, a comprehensive set of production-tested software, proactive monitoring tools, and premium support services available in an affordable annual subscription.

MySQL is a key part of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python), the fast-growing open source enterprise software stack. More and more companies are using LAMP as an alternative to expensive proprietary software stacks because of its lower cost and freedom from platform lock-in.

PHP supports eight primitive types.

Four scalar types:

• boolean
• integer
• float (floating-point number, aka double)
• string

Two compound types:

• array
• object

And finally two special types:

• resource
• NULL

This manual also introduces some pseudo-types  for readability reasons:

• mixed
• number
• callback

The error and logging functions allows error handling and logging.

The error functions allow users to define error handling rules, and modify the way the errors can be logged.

The logging functions allow users to log applications and send log messages to email, system logs or other machines.

The filesystem functions provide a wide range of tools to access and manipulate the filesystem.

PHP's filesystem functions provide a fairly broad range of functionality. All the standard functions that programmers expect are included - opening, reading, and writing files; querying the filesystem; changing permissions; copying and deleting files; etc. Many of these functions have been transparently extended to work with HTTP and FTP resources, allowing easy reading of remote files.

MySQL is the most popular open-source database system.

MySQL is a database.

The data in MySQL is stored in database objects called tables.

A table is a collection of related data entries and it consists of columns and rows.

The free MySQL database is very often used with PHP.

Before you can access data in a database, you must create a connection to the database.

In PHP, this is done with the mysql_connect() function.

A database holds one or multiple tables.

The CREATE DATABASE statement is used to create a database in MySQL.

The FTP functions give client access to file servers through the File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

The FTP functions are used to open, login and close connections, as well as upload, download, rename, delete, and get information on files from file servers. Not all of the FTP functions will work with every server or return the same results. The FTP functions became available with PHP 3.

These functions are meant for detailed access to an FTP server. If you only wish to read from or write to a file on an FTP server, consider using the ftp:// wrapper with the Filesystem functions.

PHP HTTP Introduction

The HTTP functions let you manipulate information sent to the browser by the Web server, before any other output has been sent.

Installation

The directory functions are part of the PHP core. There is no installation needed to use these functions.

You can use PHP to dynamically send emails to one or more recipients. This can be handy for a lot of reasons, for example:

• Sending newsletters to a mailing list
• Sending a "welcome" email to new members of your website
• A user has just made a purchase and you need to send them a receipt by email
• Sending an email alert to your technical administrator whenever an error occurs
• Many more reasons...

The SimpleXML functions lets you convert XML to an object.

This object can be processed, like any other object, with normal property selectors and array iterators.

Some of these functions requires the newest PHP build.