Joomla's Project Director Talks 1.1

daria42 writes "It's been a hectic six months for the Joomla open-source CMS since its split from the Mambo project, but according to this interview with project director Andrew Eddie there are even faster times ahead. Next week Joomla will make its formal debut at LinuxWorld Expo in Boston, with the milestone Joomla 1.1 release due towards the end of April. As Mambo and Joomla continue to diverge, Eddie says, users and developers will be forced to declare their colours and pick one or the other for production sites."

Comments

Sounds cool but wtf is Joomla?

[OlivierB]

Ah yes that's right, Salshdotters need to always use Wikipedia as reference guide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joomla

Re:Sounds cool but wtf is Joomla?

[myspys]

or you could read the summary?

"Joomla open-source CMS"

Re:Sounds cool but wtf is Joomla?

[Bromskloss]

or you could read the summary? "Joomla open-source CMS"

Which would then lead you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMS.

Re:Sounds cool but wtf is Joomla?

[OlivierB]

Silly me.
CMS is obviously the acronym I am most familiar with.

YACMS

[Anonymous Coward]

yet another CMS, add it to the list only 548 to choose from, so dont let anyone tell you OSS doesnt give you a choice

Re:YACMS

[hey!]

Well, there's mindshare I guess. A lot of people use Mambo and contribute products and themes for it. That's huge for most potential users.

After experimenting with it, I'd say it's biggest drawback is a lack of a decent security model. Maintaining a seperate user database is bad enough, but the security model is primitive beyond belief. It doesn't have ACLs, or even anything approaching the old Unix groups. This means its not only difficult to manage Mambo in the context of other network services you might provide, it's a PITA to manage multiple services within Mambo.

I'm looking at Drupal now as a replacement.

Re:YACMS

[WiFiBro]

Step into any OS development team and you'll soon find out why people fork.

Re:huh?

[switchfutguy]

it's pretty well the best content management system for the web...and it's *free* thank you open source

Flurbal

[courtarro]

When Smilnar director James Smith presented at the annual HARVL conference, he introduced that the Smilnar project would be joining the Yarbel group to create a new product code-named "Woolpun". Critics of the merger cite problems with Smilnar's compatibility problems with other Romolad systems, but Smith had some choice words for them: "Stewfoo"

Re:Flurbal

[Cheerio Boy]

Dead Monkeys are to split up again, according to their manager, Lefty Goldblatt. They've been in the business now ten years, nine as other groups. Originally the Dead Salmon, they became for a while, Trout. Then Fried Trout, then Poached Trout In A White Wine Sauce, and finally, Herring. Splitting up for nearly a month, the re-formed as Red Herring, which became Dead Herring for a while, and then Dead Loss, which reflected the current state of the group. Splitting up again to get their heads together, they reformed a fortnight later as Heads Together, a tight little name which lasted them through a difficult period when their drummer was suspected of suffering from death. It turned out to be only a rumor and they became Dead Together, then Dead Gear, which lead to Dead Donkeys, Lead Donkeys, and the inevitable split up. After nearly ten days, they reformed again as Sole Manier, then Dead Sole, Rock Cod, Turbot, Haddock, White Baith, the Places, Fish, Bream, Mackerel, Salmon, Poached Salmon, Poached Salmon In A White Wine Sauce, Salmon-monia, and Helen Shapiro. This last name, their favorite, had to be dropped following an injunction and they split up again. When they reformed after a recordbreaking two days, they ditched the fishy references and became Dead Monkeys, a name which they stuck with for the rest of their careers. Now, a fortnight later, they've finally split up.

Re:CMSs - solutions looking for problems...

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried, but there isn't a -1 Clueless option. Anyone who thinks being able to move files around directories is a reasonable substitute for a full blown CMS in all cases needs their attitude readjusting.

When it IS released...

[n00tz]

You'll be able to test it out at OpenSourceCMS.com

User friendly?

[rueger]

All well and good, but the real step needed for OSS CMS is to create one that an average user can administer. By "average" I mean anyone who isn't a hard core code geek. The kind of person who is comfortable installing these systems to their server, but who is more interested in tweaking the look and adding content than spending hours figuring out the arcane thinking of the people who wrote the code.

I've tried Joomla, as well as few other top rated CMS, and found all of them pretty much imcomprehensible. I'm sure that there is some underlying logic to the Administration of each of these systems, but I have failed to find it. Terminology, functionality, it all cries out for testing by real users.

Blog software like Wordpress has managed to make Administration nice, understandable, and constantly improving, so why can't CMS like Joomla do the same?

And of course, they really do need some real documentation, not half baked wikis and forums.

Re:User friendly?

[ukpyr]

Actual CMS software has a horridly large scope to deal with. Blog software is, I don't know, 10% as complex? (To pick a number out of the air)

Looking forward to 1.1....

[joeygb]

I've been using Joomla for a while now and it is definitely the way to go in the Mambo vs. Joomla decision. Joomla is really great for personal sites because of the vast number of themes/modules/plugins/etc. out there. The only problem is that a lot of these 3rd party components are far from being a stable, polished final product. I think that if Joomla wants to be used more in the business world then it probably has a lot of work to do, but for less "mission critical" uses Joomla is the way to go. I think that Joomla could learn a lot from another big open source CMS, Drupal, when it comes to building a CMS for business uses.

As an aside, is it required that all CMSs have ridiculous names?

Re:Looking forward to 1.1....

[mitchy]

Regarding the needs for "mission critical" buzzword compliance, we hope you will see the huge changes we have made to the API (and underlying core systems) to make it easier for developers to make sophisticated applications, and quickly. That has always been a benefit of Joomla, and the next release will really open up a lot of doors and provide a lot of additional tools for developers. You could reasonably say that the Joomla CMS was rewritten with the Joomla Framework.

As an aside, is it required that all CMSs have ridiculous names?

First, come up with a name for your CMS. It must be original, easy to remember, and sound good in 142 languages.

Now, this name also must have a TLD available, otherwise there's no value in the name because the TLD will always point to someone else's website.

Not only was everything in english taken, but most nice-sounding meaningful words in Swahili. So the name Joomla (despite being a sound I make when I fall down the stairs) was much better than what was available at the time. So what was available?

• www.gilflapsnatwabble.org
• www.hyposqueelygackumoid.org
• www.stickumscumdiddlywhop.org
• www.gooberflasm.org

...and so on. So the alternatives were not that attractive, give us a break man!

Re:So what's the dif ?

[smbarbour]

It really simple. Joomla has all of the developers. Therefore, Joomla continues to improve.

Mambo might have some developers, but they are not the ones who wrote it in the first place.

Disclaimer: I've never used either product (nor do I have my own website). I speak only of what I've heard.

recommendation for CMS w/o database server?

[penguin-collective]

Does anybody have a recommendation for a CMS similar to Joomla or Drupal that doesn't require a separate database server? Something that gets by with either the file system or SQLite? WYSIWYG content creation is a must in this application, so Wikis aren't an option.

Re:Useful CMS comparisons?

[wandazulu]

Here you go