Joomla! is by far my favorite content management system so I was excited to see version 1.5 was released yesterday. I have been a user of the excellent open source CMS since it was forked from the Mambo project into the Joomla project back in 2005. Since then Joomla! has grown at a breakneck pace. Looking around their site today I saw the following signs of growth.
- Extensions–The Joomla! community has developed over 2691 extensions to extend and enhance its functionality.
- Forums–The Joomla! forums are extremely active with over 1.1 million posts and more than 164,000 registered users that’s an astounding achievement.
- Wide Spread Adoption–A search for Joomla in Google shows over 50 million hits and it seems that there is no shortage of fan sites and business that have cropped up around Joomla!
Until recently I had used Joomla! for my blog but changed it due to the fact that it was really a complete content platform it was a little bit of overkill for a simple blog. I now use WordPress for my blog. I think there are some feature lessons the developers of WordPress could take from Joomla!
- Complete website administration–Joomla allows you to install plug-ins right from the Joomla! administration interface no need to ftp additional code.
- Management of Widgets – In Joomla you don’t drag and drop side bar items (called widgets in WordPress and modules in Joomla!). You then assign modules to positions and you can edit and create modules from the Joomla! administrative interface. You can also specify which pages the widgets show up on.
- Media Manager–I post my images to Flickr these days and link from there partly because managing large numbers of images in WordPress isn’t easy. In Joomla! you can organize images in a hierarchy via file manager interface.
Anyhow I love both open source platforms for different reasons and look forward to running Socialized Software on either of these open source software solutions for many years to come.
For more Mark Hinkle, visit his Socialized Software blog.