Professional Joomla walks the reader through Joomla, an open content management system that is rapidly growing in popularity. Readers will quickly advance from installation, integration, and set-up topics to digging into the underlying PHP and MySQL whose flexibility is driving the growth of the platform. Readers will explore load balancing, log tracking, and even search engine optimization. From a user standpoint, Joomla offers tremendous ease of use and simplicity. The elegant dashboard based upon the KDE interface allows content to be updated in minutes and data to flow freely from outside sources. Administrators and developers have he capability to customize virtually every aspect of the platform. For this reason extra attention is given to topics like plug-ins, the API, design and skinning, and integration with existing databases, websites, and web services.