Web Design & Development Guide

Joomla!

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Joomla!
Joomla! screenshot of Admin page
Developer:	The OSM Development Team
Latest release:	1.0.13 / July 21, 2007
Preview release:	1.5 RC1 / July 21, 2007
OS:	Cross-platform
Genre:	Content Management System
License:	GPL
Website:	www.joomla.org

Joomla! is a free, open source content management system written with PHP for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets, using the MySQL database. Joomla! includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization. Joomla! is licensed under the GPL, and is the result of a fork of Mambo.

History

Joomla! came into being as the result of a fork of Mambo between Miro Corporation of Australia, the trademark holder of the Mambo name at that time, and all of the then-core developers. The two groups parted ways on August 17, 2005. The Miro Corporation formed a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose to fund the project and protect it from lawsuits.^[1] The development team claimed that many of the provisions of the foundation structure went against previous agreements made by the elected Mambo Steering Committee, lacked the necessary consultation with key stake holders, and included provisions that violated core open source values.^[2]

The development team created a web site called OpenSourceMatters to distribute information to users, developers, web designers, and the community in general. The project team leader at the time Andrew Eddie, also known as "MasterChief," wrote an open letter to the community^[3] which appeared on the announcements section of the public forum at mamboserver.com.

Open Source Matters logo

One thousand people had joined the opensourcematters.org forum web site within a day, most posting words of encouragement and support for the actions of the Development Team. The web site received a slashdotting and news articles regarding the event appeared at newsforge.com, eweek.com, and ZDnet.com. Miro CEO Peter Lamont gave a public response in an article entitled "The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro".^[4]

This event has stirred deeply held feelings in the free software community regarding what shall constitute "open source". Forums at many other open source projects were active with postings for and against the actions of both sides. Rumor and accusations of wrongdoing by Miro and the Mambo Foundation were rampant.

In the two weeks following Eddie's announcement teams were re-organized and the community continued to grow. On September 1, 2005 the new name, "Joomla!", which is the English spelling of the Swahili (and Urdu: جملہ) word jumla meaning "all together" or "as a whole", was announced to a mixed reception of 3000+ faithful followers of the Development Team. It was chosen to reflect the commitment of the development team and community to the project.

The first release of Joomla! (Joomla! 1.0.0) was announced on September 16, 2005. This was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 combined with other bug and moderate-level security fixes. In the project's roadmap, the core developers say Joomla! 1.5 will be a completely re-written code base built with PHP 5. It was announced in 2006 and has been nominated for the vaporware award 2007.

Joomla! won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in 2006.^[5]

Features

The Joomla! package consists of many different parts, which are built to be as modular as possible, allowing extensions and integrations to be made easily. An example of such are extensions called "Plugins".^[6](Previously known as "Mambots".) Plugins are background extensions that extend Joomla! with new functionality. The WikiBot, for example, allows the author of Joomla! content to use "Wikitags" in Joomla! articles which will auto-create dynamic hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles when displayed. There are over 1,900 extensions for Joomla! available via the Extensions Directory, a site that OpenSourceMatters runs as an official directory of extensions.^[7]

In addition to Plugins, more comprehensive extensions are available. "Components" allow webmasters to perform such tasks as build a community by expanding user features, backup a website, and create URLS that are more friendly to search engines.^[8] "Modules" perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code to be inserted within the base Joomla! code.^[9]

Community

Joomla! has an official and many unofficial communities. As of July 2007, the official Joomla! forums claims 178,000 threads and over 920,000 posts from over 120,000 members in 40 languages.^[10] Unofficial sites are published in many languages, often with Joomla! extensions that are region specific. Bi-directional text support for the Hebrew and Arabic languages, for example, can be found on 3rd party community portals. Unofficial web developers also build extensions and web templates for commercial sale and offer freelance customization services.

See also

• List of content management systems

Literature

• Pirtle, Mitchell (August 7, 2006). The Definitive Guide to Joomla!. Apress. ISBN 1-59059-571-8. 
• Graf, Hagen (February 22, 2006). Building Websites with Joomla!. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1904811949. 
• Graf, Hagen (February 22, 2007). Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 Beta 1. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1847192386. 
• LeBlanc, Joseph (May 2007). Learning Joomla! Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1847191304. 
• North, Barrie (April 2007). The Joomla Admin Manual: A Step by Step Guide to a Successful Website. LuLu. ISBN 9780615146751. 
• Rahmel, Dan (July 25, 2007). Beginning Joomla!: From Novice to Professional. Apress. ISBN 1590598482. 
• Rahmel, Dan (2007). Professional Joomla!. Wrox. ISBN 978-0-470-13394-1. 

References

External links

• Official Joomla! website
• Joomla! demo
• Joomla! extensions directory
• Joomla! Showcase
• Free Joomla Downloads
• Joomla Romania

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This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.