Joomla Blogs: Latin America university moves to Joomla!
229 courses in 40 different places, five thousand teachers and more than 56 thousand students make the USP – Universidade de São Paulo (São Paulo University) in Brazil is the number one in Latin America and one of the 100 most important in the world. Since 1997 in the Internet, the university conduct a research on the last year with the visitors of USP Portal (www.usp.br) about changes and new features on this gate with intent to support the desires and requests of national and international users. The result was a set of new websites with a new navigation system, news and events channels, maps, informations to foreigners in four different languages and a new design."
Note: The off-topic but good discussion about Joomla! has been moved to its very own post: http://cmsreport.com/node/1664 . Please post there your opinions about Joomla! there. If you have comments specifically related to São Paulo University's implementation of Joomla!, those comments are still welcomed and appreciated here.
About this CMS Enthusiast
Bryan Ruby is the owner and editor for CMS Report. He founded CMSReport.com in 2006 on the belief that information technologists, website owners, and web developers desired visiting sites where they could learn about content management systems without the sales pitch. Outside of his late night blogging hours, he is the Information Technology Officer for a field office in the federal government.
Comments
#1 Nice!
Thanks for sharing that - very cool!
http://OpenSourceCommunity.org
#2 Like to share more
I'd like to share more Joomla! news, though these days I appear to be looking in the wrong direction. In fact, I've even had Drupal people ask me why I don't put more Joomla! news up. However, the majority of the RSS feeds I'm looking at from Joomla.org appears to give me a lot of advertisement (Joomla! templates, hosting, tutorials at a cost, Jommla services at a cost).
Does Joomla have something comprable to a Planet Mozzila or Planet Drupal...that appears to be more community based and less commercial based? By the way, why does Joomla.org use Wordpress for blogging and not some type of built-in module/extension for blogging? This is not an attack against Joomla! and more than Amy can answer this question. It's just that I've always been curious as to why Joomla! relies so much on third-parties for bridges/extensions to such CMS features as a forum and blogs?
#3 ... that appears to be more
... that appears to be more community based and less commercial based?
You're right. We need reach other people than just developers. If we want spread open solutions, we should write news for non technical profiles ! But where publish it ?
#4 Communities have life
Forums are not the future. Truthfully, Drupal's forum isn't Drupal's strength, anyway :P Drupal is coming from Bulletin Board beginnings -- Joomla! from CMS roots. I think that point, alone, explains a lot. Regardless, where we came from is of little consequence. Gaps are being bridged and now we are rapidly heading towards the Semantic Web - social networking - VOIP and other colloboration improvements.
You know, Bryan, the WWW was invented in 1989, the year my daughter was born. She was very young - not yet in schoool - when a friend of mine and I sat at a computer and used this thing we heard about called a Mosiac Browser. There were no images - no Flash - no Javascript - no PHP - certainly not tens of thousands of database driven websites on GoDaddy each sharing 2 gig photo galleries of children growing older, vacations at the beach and home remodeling projects. Even then, though, looking at directory listings and text files from all over the globe, we knew we were seeing something that would change our world.
The list of CMS's you have at the left will grow, and grow, and grow, until we start to realize that at some point, software became a freely available raw material, not any more or less available simply because another copy was downloaded by one more person. Websites, as we know them, will fall away. The railroad will have been built by an intelligent, volunteer crowd, somehow able to collaborate over long distances, without benefit of organizational structure or HR departments, without payment, for crying out loud, overcoming very real human failings long enough to produce what is necessary for our species.
It might not look like it, but, I really did answer your question to the best of my ability. ;-)
http://OpenSourceCommunity.org
#5 Let's not talk Drupal
You keep bringing up Drupal in our discussions about Joomla!, quit that!
Beyond using Drupal (as well as Mozzila) as examples of Planets I find informative...I was fully focused on Joomla!. I'm just asking if Joomla! has a good RSS feed that's more community driven than commercial driven? I think I'm using the wrong RSS feeds. Does any Joomla! fans have some recommendations?
Amy, as you know...a lot of effort at Joomla.org has gone into integrating/bridging non-Joomla apps...Wordpress, phpBB, and and one time SMF. A CMS that bridges such features with independent apps (forum apps, blog apps, shopping cart apps) instead of their own dependent modules intrigue me...because I see both the pluses and minuses. Using a CMS that bridges your Wordpress blog makes it easy if you are using Wordpress and doesn't require CMS "lock-in". However, also wonder about the headaches for the CMS developers and site owners when Wordpress decides to make significant API/template changes.
It's not just Joomla that does this but many other CMS, with ECM Alfresco coming to mind. I'm curious if Joomla! community itself is pushing for those features in their "core" as Joomla! matures or find the current model working for them? Not really judging Joomla! for their choices. I do admit though that I have a bias about CMS that try to deliver the features within the core or fully supported modules/plugins/extensions. It's one of the reasons that I keep an eye on not just Drupal, but e107, and in some features...CMS Made Simple.
You are wrong though, my list of CMS on the left will not grow larger. I decided a year ago to cap my list to my top 30. The CMS I list on the left all have to interest me personally and having only 30 keeps the site honest. The past few months I've had people beg and offer money to have their CMS included on the left even though I know very little about them. It's not money I want from these people, it's participation and conversation.
#6 Actually, you said "Drupal
Actually, you said "Drupal people" asking, you talked about "Drupal's native forum" and "Drupal's communication methods" with Planet. Frankly, I'd rather not compare. But, in all honestly, you were and you still are. You are approaching this from your experience from Drupal - how Drupal operates - Drupal's core - Drupal's forums - and asking why J! is different.
OK. Let's get busy - here's some straight talk on Joomla! - from my perspective -
- Joomla! is huge. Some think it's ten times the install base of Drupal. Some think there are even more J! installs than WP. (I find that hard to believe, but the graphs seem to support it.)
- Commercial is not the same as proprietary. (We've had this talk - it's a license thing. not a charge thing. Acquia is really showing how to do commercial GPL - well within the terms of the license.)
- Yes, there are more commercial "ads" than informational blogs in the J! community. Why? Well, I suppose there are a few reasons for that. First of all, when you have ten times the customer base, advertising will increase. Secondly, Joomla! has working groups who communicate in the forums and on Google Groups and via email and Skype. So, you won't see that communication in your RSS feeds.
- In an open source community, the most active people tend to be commercial. It makes some sense since it is their livihood. In communities where code is shared on a common SVN, "advertising" tends to be more about reputation, contributions, involvement. So, communication looks different.
The RSS feed you are talking about from Joomla! is not managed like WordPress's RSS feed inside of their admin utility or Drupal's. Dude - you gotta be on the "A" list to make that feed. In Joomla!, you have to submit the news item. So, turning the question around, how do you think a community's RSS feeds might change if those feeds were liberated a bit? Would they become more self-promoting? Advertising?
I look forward to Joomla! continuing to mature in this way and to use blogging for discussion of concepts. Sorry, but Drupal will be heading the other way. :P WordPress is taking huge steps towards the CMS market and the group blogging environment. Will be interesting to see if their discussions get more lofty or more commercial.
I tried for polite and subtle, but, apparently just turned out to be unclear. Straight up - the WP integration was ridiculous. Who in their right mind would put someone else's CMS inside of their own? Time would have been better spent on a little comment module. The person who reached that conclusion is gone.
I can't think of an open source CMS that doesn't integrate with phpBB or SMF. That includes WordPress and Drupal. Sorry, but, Drupal's forum is not the best. Neither is WordPress's. Joomla! does have a native forum. It's called FireBoard. I don't think it's any worse - or any better - than the other two.
Perhaps others who focus exclusively on forums, build better forums?
Is there any CMS with a native shopping cart app? But, if you need strong support for eCommerce - does anyone doubt that Joomla! is clearly in front?
It is odd to hear you say you prefer a CMS that delivers more features in core. Drupal doesn't come with much in Core, at all. WordPress is just cute as a button - but - it's lean and mean in core, too. Have you heard the claim that Joomla! is bloated? Well - it's because SO MUCH is bundled in core. The talk in Joomla! is increasingly about unloading that baby fat and stripping down to the shiny new MVC application architecture, object oriented environment underneath. Getting naked, as it were.
I didn't mean "your" list. I meant "the list" of OSCMS options available to the world. My apologies for my poor wording. :P
Amy beams. :-)
http://OpenSourceCommunity.org
http://OpenSourceCommunity.org
#7 Good discussion
This is actually good discussion. Though, again I'm not trying to push anyone into defending Joomla! here, but instead discussing Joomla!
With regards to "shopping carts", I probably could have clarified better. I wasn't so much trying to say that it should be part of the initial core package, but instead looking at shopping carts that are dependent on the core. For example, Joomla! reliance on an osCommerce bridge never really went far enough for most Joomla! users. This in turn prompted the need for the very well done Joomla! extension, VirtueMart. Someone in the Joomla! community recognized the need to not build bridges but to give Joomla! its very own ecommerce extension and some big pluses were gained.
This is why I wonder for Joomla! or any other CMS whether in the long run they're better served with creating bridges to other independent Web apps or to create modules/extensions/plug-ins that that are dependent on the CMS to deliver.
I'm struggling with a client's site that depends on SMF for a forum, osCommerce for a shopping cart, and some poorly written PHP scripts I wrote for him to glue it all together. The site needs an upgrade. Because Joomla! does a better job in bridging with forums (whether it is SMF or phpBB) than Drupal and the community is more open to the idea of bridges, I'm considering using Joomla! Actually neither Drupal or Joomla may be my first choice, but that's another discussion. My point is that no matter what type of CMS portal I may decide to use, a decision needs to be made whether to continue bridging the CMS with independent apps or using modules/extensions/plugins that are written exclusively for that CMS (ie VirtueCart).
From my perspective, CMS projects that have solutions from within the project serve the users better in the long run. I agree with you that a CMS provided feature (whether in the core or a dependent plugin/module/extension) such as a forum, blog, etc is usually not as good in features as an independent application (such as Wordpress, SMF, phpBB, etc). Yet, in the long-term, I often wonder whether such bridges are really a solution. This is a question I've pondered for some time and it's not really just a Drupal or Joomla question.
Either way, I agree that social software is changing the landscape once again. The independent forums and blogs as we know them now is quickly being pushed out of the spotlight by advances in modern social publishing systems. I think even many of the CMS on "my list" will either have to evolve into more social features or be dead projects in a year or two. Things are changing quickly...
#8 Discussion moved
Discussion has been moved to: http://cmsreport.com/node/1664
-Bryan
#9 Rest of the article
The link is broken to the rest of that article. Can you help me find it?
#10 Article gone?
Hi Brian,
Like you, I looked for the original article. It originally appeared at Joomla.org and I'm unclear if it was an original article or an article that originated from another site. Joomla.org did a revamp of their site some time ago making changes to their blogs and forums. It appears in the shuffle, for whatever reason, the article was dropped.
At this point the only articles covering this story I found online were at sites like mine that only included an excerpt/link. Perhaps someone from the Joomla Community knows where you could find the original article to the story. Good luck.
#11 More Story
I think I found the rest of the story:
Latin America university moves to Joomla!
After one year of research, the biggest Latin America university moves to Joomla! 1.5.
229 courses in 40 different places, five thousand teachers and more than 56 thousand students make the USP – Universidade de São Paulo (São Paulo University) in Brazil is the number one in Latin America and one of the 100 most important in the world. Since 1997 in the Internet, the university conduct a research on the last year with the visitors of USP Portal (www.usp.br) about changes and new features on this gate with intent to support the desires and requests of national and international users. The result was a set of new websites with a new navigation system, news and events channels, maps, informations to foreigners in four different languages and a new design.
To support the enormous requests demands, this new version was developed with the free CMS Joomla!, that include easy ways to input and manage content with performance and stability. Supporting the highest standarts, the USP Portal Council offers to the general visitors access about all scientific, cultural and technological production of the university and shows-off the institution nationally and internationally.
With the expertise of an external adviser, this project demanded hundred hours of the USP Online staff, the department with the responsibility over the portal to create a new graphic project. They researched components and extensions, tools and the migration of old data to the new format. After much study of free software CMS tools, the university choose the CMS Joomla! because it has an easy integration of information, low maintainment needs and an easy-to-use interface - basic points needed to manage a big universe of informations like this.