In geekspeak, Joomla is a Content Management System (or CMS). The idea behind a CMS is to focus on what you want your web page to say, and let the computer worry about organizing it and making it into an attractive and functional web page. Joomla is going to be handling all of the non-forum related functions of Cleveland Swings. Things like the portal page, calendar, faq, advertisements, announcements, etc. will be handled by Joomla.

We are using Joomla, because it provides a convenient and secure way of adding new features to the site. In the past, Cleveland Swings only ran phpBB, which is solely written to provide a website with discussion forums. All of the other functions (calendar, portal page, etc), were added to Cleveland Swings by physically modifying the phpBB software. This approach is very labor intensive, very prone to error, and very difficult to maintain (trust me, I've been doing it). 

By using Joomla, I can stop modifying phpBB by hand, and let Joomla handle all of the details of adding new features. For example, installing the calendar software for the new Cleveland Swings took 45 seconds. The calendar for the old website took more than two hours to install, and I had to do it twice.