There is no better place to start an online glossary of Joomla jargon than the letter 'a'. We begin with Joomla specific terms and then move on to more general, but related, IT terms.

Joomla Jargon:

ACL - Access Control Layer

This is techno speak for the levels of users that are supported within Joomla and for the permissions that each of these 'user groups' is then granted. For example within Joomla the highest level of user is a 'Super Administrator' who can do anything within Joomla. The lowest level of user is a 'public visitor' that is just a person who happens along on the site. Next level up is a 'registered user' who has created a basic account and who can see content that has been restricted from 'public' view.

Admin Interface

The area of your website where you control the higher level functioning of your Joomla powered website (see also 'back-end'). Users who are Manager, Administrator or Super administrator can access the /administrator/ area of the site and carry out a range of tasks that people with more limited accounts cannot.

Admin Templates

Templates used to define the layout of the Administrator (Back-end) area of your Joomla! web site. See also: Site Templates and Templates.

Administrator

User level within Joomla with access to some Administrator (Back-end) and Front-end (normal visible website) functions. See also: Manager and Super Administrator.

Archive

Content Items can be archived and managed through the Administrator (Back-end). The Archive Module provides a way of displaying archived items on your web site.

Article

In the 1.0.x versions of Joomla 'article' was an unofficial common place term for 'content items' (individual stories). With the launch of Joomla 1.5 'article' is now the official name for 'Content Item'.

Author

User level within Joomla! with access only to Site (Front-end) functions. See also: Editor, Publisher, and Registered.

Not Directly Joomla Related:

These are definitions for some related technologies that are not directly or specifically applicable to Joomla but which the new web site operator will inevitably come across

Alt attribute

Author-defined alternate text for an image. The browser displays this text rather than the image, and it describes to the reader what they are missing on a page. It is a good practice to include the alt attribute for each image on a page to improve the display and usefulness of your document for instances in which the browser cannot load images, for users unable to view images due to sight impairment, or for people who have text-only browsers. See also: Image Tag.

Apache

An Open Source web server project. Joomla! is optimised to function fully on an Apache web server. Visit the home of the Apache Web Server Project. Over 70% of the world's Internet sites are run from Apache web servers! See also: IIS, PHP, MySQL

Attribute

Extended part of an HTML tag that carries extra settings or information.