Articles are the main way you publish text on a Joomla site, and the Articles component is where you write and manage them. Most of what a visitor reads on a typical site is an article.

Articles are organised into categories, which can be nested as deeply as you need, and can be tagged across categories. They offer more ways to be displayed than anything else in Joomla — as a single page, as a blog, as a list, as featured items on the home page, or pulled into any part of the layout by a module.

Custom fields let you add your own structured information to articles — a price, a date, a location — without writing code. With the right permissions, articles can also be created and edited from the front end of the site, without going into the administrator at all.

The Contacts component holds the people and places a visitor might need to reach, and presents them either as a single contact page or as a browsable directory.

Each contact record can carry a postal address, phone and email, an image, a position, and free-form text, and can display a contact form that sends a message without exposing the email address on the page. Contacts are organised into categories, so the same component covers a one-page "contact us" and a full staff or branch directory.

Because contacts support custom fields, the record can be extended to hold whatever a particular site needs — office hours, a department, a service area — without any code.

Smart Search is the search component built into Joomla. It builds an index of your site's content ahead of time, so results come back quickly and can be filtered, rather than running a slow query across the database on every search.

Smart Search covers articles, categories, contacts, news feeds and tags out of the box, and other extensions can add their own content to the index. Presenting it on the front end takes two pieces: a Smart Search menu item for the results page, and the Smart Search module if you want a search box in a template position.

Before search will return anything, the index has to be built once from Components → Smart Search in the site administrator. After that it stays up to date automatically as content is saved, and it can also be re-indexed on a schedule. Smart Search documentation

News Feeds (com_newsfeeds) is a way to display content published by other sites. Give Joomla the address of a site's RSS or Atom feed and it will pull in the headlines and show them on your pages, refreshing them as the other site posts.

Feeds are organised into categories in the same way as articles, and there are menu item types for a single feed, for a list of the feeds in one category, and for a list of all feed categories. Feeds are added in the administrator under Components → News Feeds.

For a single feed in a module position rather than a full page, use the Feed Display module instead.

The Users component handles who can get into a site and what they can do once they are in. On the front end it provides registration, login and logout, profile editing and password recovery. In the administrator it is where accounts are created, blocked and managed, and where user groups and access levels are defined.

Access control in Joomla works by placing users into groups and granting permissions to those groups, rather than to individuals. Alongside that, Joomla includes account-security options such as multi-factor authentication and passwordless sign-in, and an actions log for auditing what was changed and by whom. Users documentation

Note that some of the user views will not display anything unless you are logged in to the site.

Weblinks provides a structured way to collect external links, group them into categories, and present them consistently on the site. Each link can carry a description, a target-window setting and a hit counter, and categories can be published as menu items in the same way as article categories.

Weblinks is not part of the Joomla core package. It is maintained by the Joomla project as a separate extension and is installed alongside Joomla, which means it is also updated separately from the CMS. If it is not present on a site, the Weblinks menu items and modules will have nothing to display. Weblinks downloads

Every component listed elsewhere in this site also has an administrator side. In addition, there are components in the administrator that have no front end display of their own but still shape how the site works. The ones most site owners use are:

• Media
• Extensions
• Menus
• Global Configuration
• Banners
• Redirect

Media Manager

Found under Content → Media. This is where images, documents and other files are uploaded and organised into folders. Files can be dragged onto the page to upload several at once, and images can be inserted into an article from the editor's image button. Allowed file types and size limits are set in the component's Options.

Extensions Manager

Found under the System menu. Extensions are installed from the Install panel, and enabled, disabled, updated or removed from the Manage panel. Components, modules, plugins, templates and language packs are all handled here.

Menu Manager

Found under Menus. This is where the menus shown on the site are built. Each menu item chooses the page type and its layout options, and modules and template styles can be assigned to individual menu items.

Global Configuration

Found under System. This is where site-wide settings live: the site name, search engine friendly URLs, the default metadata used by search engines, caching, mail settings and the site's error reporting level. The defaults are a reasonable starting point, but the metadata should be set to describe the site before it goes public.

Banners

Found under Components → Banners. It provides a simple way to display a rotating image in a module, and, if the site carries advertising, to record how many times each banner was shown and clicked.

Redirect

Redirect records the URLs that produced a Page Not Found (404) error and lets each one be pointed at a working page. It is most useful after a site move or a restructure, when old addresses are still being followed from elsewhere.