Joomla! means All Together, and it is a community of people all working and having fun together that makes Joomla! possible. Thousands of people each year participate in the Joomla! community, and we hope you will be one of them.

People with all kinds of skills, of all skill levels and from around the world are welcome to join in. Participate in the Joomla.org family of websites (the forum is a great place to start). Come to a Joomla! event. Join or start a Joomla! Users Group. Whether you are a developer, site administrator, designer, end user or fan, there are ways for you to participate and contribute.

If you are an experienced Joomla! 1.5 user, 1.6 will seem very familiar. There are new templates and improved user interfaces, but most functionality is the same. The biggest changes are improved access control (ACL) and nested categories.

The Joomla! Project consists of all of the people who make and support the Joomla! Web Platform and Content Management System.

Our mission is to provide a flexible platform for digital publishing and collaboration.

The core values are:

• Freedom
• Equality
• Trust
• Community
• Collaboration
• Usability

In our vision, we see:

• People publishing and collaborating in their communities and around the world
• Software that is free, secure, and high-quality
• A community that is enjoyable and rewarding to participate in
• People around the world using their preferred languages
• A project that acts autonomously
• A project that is socially responsible
• A project dedicated to maintaining the trust of its users

There are millions of users around the world and thousands of people who contribute to the Joomla! Project. They work in three main groups: the Production Working Group, responsible for everything that goes into software and documentation; the Community Working Group, responsible for creating a nurturing the community; and Open Source Matters, the non profit organization responsible for managing legal, financial and organizational issues.

Joomla! is a free and open source project, which uses the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

Default on:

• Joomla Help

Default off:

Two new plugins are available in 1.6 but are disabled by default.

• Contact Creator Help
  Creates a new linked contact record for each new user created.
• Profile Help
  This example profile plugin allows you to insert additional fields into user registration and profile display. This is intended as an example of the types of extensions to the profile you might want to create.