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Joomla!
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Joomla! | |
|---|---|
 |
|
 Joomla! screenshot of Admin page |
|
| Developer | The OSM Development Team |
| Latest release | 1.0.13 / July 21, 2007 |
| Preview release | 1.5 RC3 / October 6, 2007 |
| OS | Cross-platform |
| Genre | Content Management System |
| License | GPL |
| Website | www.joomla.org |
Joomla! is a free, open source content management system for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets. 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.
It is written with the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database.
Contents |
Joomla! came into being as the result of a fork of Mambo by all of its then-core developers on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was trademarked by Miro International Pty Ltd, who 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, A.K.A. "MasterChief" (who rejoined the team as of 15 August 2007), wrote an open letter to the community[3] which appeared on the announcements section of the public forum at mamboserver.com.
A thousand people had joined the opensourcematters.org web site within a day, most posting words of encouragement and support for the actions of the development team. The web site received the slashdot effect 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 as were rumours of a potential venture capitalisation by the members of the Core Team through the Jamboworks brand.
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 and Arabic: جملة) 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.[citation needed] This was a key piece of marketing to the wider community by the Development Team as trademark records show that Joomla! has a meaning of "minister" in Arabic.
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 2005 and has been nominated for the vaporware award 2007, but since a third release candidate has been published on 6 October 2007 (RC3), supporters expect a final product within the next year. Information about the development status of Joomla! 1.5 can be found in the Joomla! Team Blog. Joomla! won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in 2006[5] and 2007[6]
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".[7] (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 2,500 extensions for Joomla! available via the Extensions Directory, a site that OpenSourceMatters runs as an official directory of extensions.[8]
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, translate content and create URLs that are more friendly to search engines.[9] "Modules" perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc to be inserted within the base Joomla! code.[10]
Joomla! has an official and many unofficial communities. As of December 2007, the official Joomla! forum has more than 220,000 threads and over 1.1 million posts from over 150,000 registered members in 40 languages.[11] 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. Usually a template is distributed as a zip file which can be installed using the Joomla! installer.
- ^ Mambo Foundation web site, Goals and objectives (2006-01-09). Retrieved on 2007-03-14.
- ^ Joomla! Forum Discussion by Development Team members and Community (2007-05-07). Retrieved on 2007-05-07.
- ^ Andrew Eddie (2005-08-17). Mambo Open Source Development Team - Letter to the community. OpenSourceMatters. Retrieved on 2007-03-14.
- ^ Ric Shreves (2005-08-21). The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro. Retrieved on 2007-07-26.
- ^ 2006 Open Source Content Management System Award Winner Announced. Packt Publishing (2006-11-14). Retrieved on 2007-03-08.
- ^ Joomla! Wins Best PHP Open Source Content Management System. Packt Publishing (2007-10-31). Retrieved on 2007-10-31.
- ^ Joomla! Extensions Directory - Content Management (2007-07-28). Retrieved on 2007-07-28.
- ^ Joomla Extensions Directory - FrontPage. Retrieved on 2007-10-13.
- ^ Joomla! Extensions Directory - Content Management (2007-07-28). Retrieved on 2007-07-28.
- ^ Joomla! Extensions Directory - Content Management (2007-07-28). Retrieved on 2007-07-28.
- ^ Joomla! Community Forum - Statistics Center. Retrieved on 2007-11-29.
- 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.
- Dawson, Brandon, Canavan, Tom (October 2007). Joomla! Cash. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1847191401.
- 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.