Joomla!
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Joomla | |
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 Joomla 1.5 screenshot of Administrator |
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| Developed by | The Joomla Core Team |
| Latest release | 1.5.3 / April 24, 2008 |
| OS | Cross-platform |
| Genre | Content Management System |
| License | GPL |
| Website | joomla.org |
Joomla is a free, open source content management system for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets. The system 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.
The name Joomla officially ends with an exclamation mark, but this is commonly omitted.
It is written in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database by default.
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[edit] History
Joomla came into being as the result of a fork of Mambo by the development team 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 Andrew Eddie, aka "MasterChief" 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. The web site received the slashdot effect as a result. Miro CEO Peter Lamont gave a public response to the development team in an article entitled "The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro".[4]
This event 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.
In the two weeks following Eddie's announcement teams were re-organized and the community continued to grow. Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) assisted the Joomla core team beginning in August 2005, as indicated by Moglen's blog entry from that date and a related OSM announcement. The SFLC continue to provide legal guidance to Joomla project.
On August 18, 2005, Andrew Eddie called for community input on suggested names for the project. The development team indicated that it would make the final decision for the project name based on community input. The name the development team chose was not in the list of suggested names provided by the community as it was chosen with consultation from a professional brand consultancy under the pay of Open Source Matters.
On September 1, 2005 the new name, "Joomla", which is the English spelling of the Swahili (Arabic:جملة ,and Urdu: جملہ ) word jumla meaning "all together" or "as a whole" was announced.
On September 7, 2005, the development team called for logo submissions from the community, invited the community to vote on the logo preferred, and announced the community's decision on September 22, 2005. Following the logo selection, Brand Guidelines, a Brand Manual, and set of Logo Resources were published on October 2, 2005 for the community's use.
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. Joomla version 1.5 was released on January 22, 2008. Joomla won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in 2006[5] and 2007.[6]
[edit] 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".[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 3,100 extensions for Joomla available via the Extensions Directory.[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.[7] "Modules" perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc to be inserted within the base Joomla code.[7]
Since it has been around longer, there are more extensions available for Joomla 1.0 than for Joomla 1.5, although native 1.5 extensions are becoming increasingly available. Some of the older 1.0 extensions can be used with version 1.5 if it is set to legacy mode.
Joomla permits administrators to set global configuration parameters that affect every article. Every page conforms to these parameters by default, but a page can have its own setting for each parameter. For example, you can elect to show the article author, hide the author, or simply go with the global "show author" parameter.
[edit] Community
Joomla has an official and many unofficial communities. As of February 2008, the official Joomla forum has more than 260,000 threads and over 1.2 million posts from more than 170,000 registered members in 40 languages.[9] 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.
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Dawson, Brandon & Canavan, Tom (2007), Joomla Cash, Packt Publishing, ISBN 1847191401
- Graf, Hagen (2006). Building Websites with Joomla. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1904811949.
- Graf, Hagen (2007). Building Websites with Joomla 1.5 Beta 1. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1847192386.
- Graf, Hagen (2008). Building Websites with Joomla 1.5 stable. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1847195302.
- LeBlanc, Joseph (2007). Learning Joomla Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1847191304.
- North, Barrie (2007). The Joomla Admin Manual: A Step by Step Guide to a Successful Website. LuLu. ISBN 9780615146751.
- North, Barrie (2007). Joomla A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla Powered Website. Prentice Hall PTR. ISBN 9780136135609.
- Rahmel, Dan (2007). Beginning Joomla: From Novice to Professional. Apress. ISBN 1590598482.
- Rahmel, Dan (2007). Professional Joomla. Wrox. ISBN 978-0-470-13394-1.
[edit] References
- ^ 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.
- ^ a b c Joomla Extensions Directory - Content Management (2007-07-28). Retrieved on 2007-07-28.
- ^ Joomla Extensions Directory - FrontPage. Retrieved on 2007-10-13.
- ^ Joomla Community Forum. Retrieved on 2008-02-18.
