Overview Zikula is a Web Application Toolkit, which allows you to run impressive websites and build powerful online applications. Zikula has received praise for many things, but we belive the highlights are ease of use, quick and easy development, security and performance and lastly flexibility. A tool kit provides you with a number of different tools to get a job done. Zikula does just that, but for websites and web applications. Depending on which distribution you choose to run, Zikula could manage your blog articles, allow comments on your site, run a forum, downloads section or link directory or even handle static content in any number of languages. For day to day work with Zikula, you won't need any technical knowledge - those of us on the team have set up websites for multi-national organisations, blogs, schools, the Scout Association and even Church groups. All of these people were able to use Zikula effectively for their needs.

Features

• Easy, step-by-step graphical installer
• Web-based administration panel so there is no need for FTP access for daily site management
• User registration and permissions system, giving webmasters the ability to manage user access to content and features
• Completely extensible through additional modules
• Strong user community providing many third party modules/themes to further extend the core features
• Support for fully HTML templated modules allowing the webmaster to change content display through simple HTML and without modifying the application code.
• Site look/feel controlled through a flexible, easy to use theme system. Allowing a site administrator to change the look and arrange the content by changing HTML and not PHP code.
• Built in caching increases the speed of your web site.
• HTML Compliancy to W3C guidelines, and Bobby accessibility makes your website display consistantly accross systems, enables users with disabilities to get the most out of your site, and also provides for the standards of the future in all output sent to user's browsers.
• 'Short-URLs' Support. Instead of seeing long urls containing many, many variables that are not easy for humans to remember, Short-URLs support creates a shortened version of a URL for output to a visitor's browser, making the page more memorable, and also sometimes helping in search engine rankings.
• Easy upgrades so you can stay current with the latest releases
• Multilingual support through an official project, many, many different translations of the project are available from the NOC. There are also many localized support sites
• Permissions control. Through the permissions system, you can customise your users experience. If you need more help administrating your website, permissions can allow certain members access to add downloads, but not administrate any other part of the website. By the same permissions control, you can create a subscriber based website that gives added functionality to subscribers.
• Mail Configuration module, meaning Zikula sites can use external SMTP servers for sending mail.
• WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get Editor) is available for download as a core module, but others can be integrated seamlessly into Zikula as modules. This gives any administrator a choice of WYSIWYG editors to use, depending on browser compatibility or functionality required.
• Statistics records all of this data, and can generate many different reports based on the collected data with just a few clicks!
• AvantGo gives users the ability to read site news on their Personal Digital Assistants (works with the news module).
• Autolinks automatically link keywords to a predefined URL.
• Censor asterisks (*) replace any offending word.
• Credits automatically list the credits for the functionality you install.
• Downloads a download repository, with ability for users to submit downloads.
• FAQ creates a database of frequently asked questions for your site.
• Legal generic legal documents adaptable to your situation.
• Members lists all registered members on your site.
• Private messages internal messages system between users.
• News ability to publish News articles, users can also submit articles for approval.
• Administration Messages displays messages to specific groups on your site.
• Banners module, allows banners to display with impression and click counts, and logins for clients.
• Comments add comments functionality to news articles.
• Ephemerids 'This day in history...' module.
• Polls survey your members.
• Quotes display famous quotes, or testimonials from users.
• Ratings rate anything on your site.
• Recommend Us allow users to recommend your site.
• Reviews review anything, and users can also submit their own reviews.
• Built in search provides users with the ability to search your site for a specified word or phrase.
• Sections displays static HTML content on your site.
• Top List/What's Hot provides a listing of the most popular content on your site.
• Topics are for posting your news under.
• Web Links is a Yahoo style directory where users can submit and rate useful links.
• Calendar, a calendar integrated into Zikula, for display of upcoming events.