Welcome to the demo blog. The drop down menu at the top of every page is called a suckerfish menu type.As you mouse over the menu links another menu drops down and if there are sub-menus on the other links they will expand either to the left or right. Now that you know how the menu works, mouse over the link Blog/Demo Blog. The sub-menus will be different layouts for the content that you can configure however you like. Section List, Section Blog, Category List and Category Blog. Click on them to see the different layouts.

When I say "layout", that has nothing to do with the artwork and layout of the website, but the manner that you display your content or "articles" as they are called with Joomla. As you can see with the examples when you click the different layouts, there are only a few ways to do it. They are :

• List - A list of the articles or categories in a table form
• Blog - A list of articles in Blog form which is usually the title of the article, some intro text and sometimes a small picture.

In both layouts there are many ways to configure them to display the content or things related to the content like author name, creation date and last modified date. There is actually another layout called "article layout" which is the layout of the article itself.

Joomla has a lot of flexibility and features so it can be complicated as you dig in but it can also be very easy if you just want to do basic things with it. Joomla comes with a basic WYSIWYG editor with the core install but the one we are using on this site is a third party component that we have installed to make editing a little more flexible and easy. Joomla can be used as a simple blog site or you add more sophisticated third party components, modules and plugins to do just about anything you can think of. You can create anything from shopping carts and social networking sites to photo galleries and video libraries.

All this information used to create the articles and displaying them in the sections and categories is stored in a database. The way the site looks and interacts with visitors is called a template. That allows you to change the look and feel of the website by changing the artwork and css of the template and not touch the content of the articles. There are thousands of designers that make templates for joomla and even more that create components, modules and plugins. You could think of those as programs.