As you know, Joomla! is a web application. It's a software tool that's installed on a web server and that's accessed through a browser. Creating and managing a site with Joomla! is an online activity. Wherever you are, if you have Internet access you can log in to the Joomla! administration interface to manage your site.

This means every Joomla! site has a "staff entrance" your site visitors will never get to see. It's the administration interface or backend of your site. By default, only the site administrator has permission to log in to the backend; later on, the administrator can give other contributors access. Although there's also such a thing as frontend editing, generally you will administer your site using the backend. The backend is the interface for all site management tasks, such as adding content, changing menus, or customizing the layout.

The public face of your Joomla! site is called—you might have guessed it—the frontend. That's just another word for "your website as the visitor sees it".

In the rest of this chapter, you'll learn more about these two basic notions in Joomla!. First, we'll take a closer look at the frontend (the final output of whatever you do in Joomla!). Exploring the Joomla! example website, we'll check out the many features the CMS offers you right out of the box. After that, we'll examine how the backend works and get our hands dirty with some real life content management activities.