Joomla! is a free open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web Application Development framework. 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.
History
Joomla! came into being as the result of the fork of Mambo by the development team on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was trademarked by Miro International Pvt 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, a.k.a. "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 and 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 titled "The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro".[4] This event created controversy within the free software community about the definition of "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.[5][6] The SFLC continue to provide legal guidance to the Joomla! project.[7]
On August 18 2005, Andrew Eddie called for community input on suggested names for the project. The core team indicated that it would make the final decision for the project name based on community input. The name the core team eventually chose was not on the list of suggested names provided by the community.
On September 1, 2005 the new name, "Joomla!", was announced, which is the English spelling of the Arabic word jumla (جملة) meaning "all together" or "as a whole", as well as "sentence" (as in, phrase).[8]
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.[9]
Joomla! (Joomla 1.0.0) was released on September 16, 2005. It was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 which, itself, was combined with other bug and moderate-level security fixes. Joomla! won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in both 2006 and 2007.[10][11]
On October 27, 2008, PACKT Publishing announced Johan Janssens, as elected by the Joomla community, the "Most Valued Person" (MVP) for his work leading the project through the development of the new 1.5 Joomla Framework and Architecture as the only PHP based CMS with a solid development framework.
Joomla! version 1.5 was released on January 22, 2008. The most recent release (31 May, 2009) is 1.5.10. At the end of June 2009 an alpha version of 1.6 is being expected
Community
Joomla! has an official and many unofficial communities. By July 2008, the official Joomla! forum had more than 300,000 threads and over 1.3 million posts from more than 255,000 registered members in 40 languages.[12] 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.[citation needed] Unofficial web developers also build extensions and web templates for commercial sale and offer freelance customization services. Usually extensions (as well as templates) are distributed as a zip file which can be installed using the Joomla! installer.
Features
The Joomla! package consists of many different parts, which allow modular extensions and integrations to be made easily. An example of such are extensions called "Plugins".[13] (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.[14] There are over 4,000 extensions for Joomla! available via the Extensions Directory.[15]
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.[13] "Modules" perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc., to be inserted within the base Joomla! code.[13]
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.[16] Every page conforms to these parameters by default, but a page can have its own setting for each parameter. For example, you can select to show or hide the article author or simply go with the global "show author" parameter.
Criticism
The latest Joomla! does not have built in granular user access control,[17] although this is planned for Joomla! 1.6.[18]
The built in section/category feature is limited by the simple section/category/article hierarchy,[19] however flexible category structure support is planned for Joomla 1.6
Each website requires a separate Joomla! installation.[20]
Although Joomla! supports right-to-left languages, bi-directional templates are non-existent, other than those supplied with the Joomla! install. Third-party template developers universally work in hard-coded LTR or RTL, despite Joomla's comprehensive bi-directional support.[21]
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