Component A component is a kind of Joomla! extension. Components are the main functional units of Joomla!; they can be seen as mini-applications. An easy analogy would be that Joomla! is the operating system and the components are desktop applications. They are usually displayed in the center of the main content area of a template (depending on the template). Most components have two main parts: an administrator part and a site part. The site part is what is used to render pages when being called during normal site operation. The administrator part provides an interface to configure and manage different aspects of the component and is accessible through the Joomla! administrator application. Joomla! comes with a number of core components, like the content management system, contact forms and Web Links. Reference: http://docs.joomla.org/Glossary
Author A user level on a Joomla site that can write and submit articles. Author has access to functions from the front end only.
Alias Aliases are short pieces of text that represent the title of certain items (Menu items, Articles and Categories) in a machine-friendly format. This format allows only lowercase letters and dashes (-). Aliases are used by Joomla to make Search Engine Friendly URLs. There are technical limitations to the types of characters that can be included in URLs, so Joomla prevents problems with invalid characters by allowing you to specify an alias. You can fill in an alias yourself. If you leave the alias field empty, Joomla will automatically create an alias from the Title field of an item when it is saved. This means that if you edit the title of an item, but you leave the old alias in its field, the alias (and the URL that is created from it) will not change. Empty the alias field if you want generate a new alias. Reference: http://docs.joomla.org/Glossary
