Webdistortion, a web design studio in Northern Ireland, recently reviewed nine different e-commerce platforms. All nine platforms reviewed were open source software packages.

With e-commerce webdesign really starting to take off, its never been more important to choose a platform which suits you as a developer (i.e. one that you can support) and one that will provide your clients with the features that they need to run a successful online shop.

There are a number of ways of getting a shop online, and we’ve focused primarily on open source e-commerce platforms here.

Those nine e-commerce platforms under review include: osCommerce, ZenCart, VirtueMart (Joomla!/Mambo), Magento, DashCommerce, CubeCart, X-Cart, LiteCommerce, and Shopify. If you're looking for a brief and consolidated review of open source shopping carts, then the Webdistortion reivew is a nice place for you to visit.

For those curious, I found this story via DZone.

The Joomla! community has released a new version of their CMS, Joomla 1.5.3.

The Joomla! community is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla! 1.5.3 [Vahi]. This release is earlier than scheduled in order to correct a database name validation error introduced in 1.5.2. It has been a month since Joomla! 1.5.2 was released on March 23, 2008. The goal is to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla! end user community containing the latest bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Latest bug fixes and enhancements in this release includes:

• Database name validation
• xHTML compliance fixes
• Help screen updates
• JFilterInput infinite loop fix
• PDF fixes for PHP 4
• Minor CSS and RTL issues

Additional information about Joomla 1.5.3 as well as goals for a future release can be found at Joomla.org.

OpenSourceCommunity: As I look at the Psystar Web site, built using Joomla! and VirtueMart, both free, as in liberty solutions, I can't help but wonder if we might be seeing these little extra pushes right now.

Psystar offers a product called "Open Mac." Well, today Psystar wisely renamed the product Open Computer.

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Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 is a new book from Packt which is written as a practical step-by-step guide to building a website from scratch. Written by Hagen Graf, this book takes the reader through the tasks essential to create a Joomla! website as rapidly as possible.

Joomla! started as a fork from Mambo in 2005, when many of the original developers of the Mambo CMS moved to working on Joomla! It has rapidly grown in popularity and is a cutting Edge Content Management System and one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management systems in the world. It is used world-wide for anything from simple homepages to complicated corporate websites. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable.

The April issue of Adobe Edge contains the article, Review of open source content management systems. The article provides an overview of what the author describes as "five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions". The five open source CMS included in the author's list are CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. After reading the article, I found myself wondering how we "reviewers" can actually improve our reviews of open source CMS. More importantly, I've come to the realization that I can no longer claim to be non-biased in which CMS I believe is the best out there.

The author does a fine job in the article describing the similarities and differences between the CMS being reviewed. However, one of the issues I have in this article and many others I've read that review CMS is the big jumps in the conclusion:

Drupal, Joomla!, and XOOPS are best for building an e-commerce site because all three offer:

• Inventory management
• Support for third-party payment processing mechanisms (such as PayPal)
• Modules for shipping and sales tax calculators
• Shopping cart functionality

While it is true that Drupal, Joomla! and XOOPS can do e-commerce, none of these CMS can do that straight out of the box. I can just imagine a shop owner or design company trying Drupal, Joomla!, or XOOPS for the very first time and wondering, "how the heck do I get a shopping-cart into the CMS?". While the author does hint in the article that third-party modules are needed to make the e-commerce work, I think the author would have been better off better explaining that "some work is required" to get those features into the CMS.

This is a tough time for blog reading junkies like me. I like to spend some of my time in the evenings winding down by reading CMS related blogs. Well, it seems some of my favorite blogs have decided to take a vacation. For example, many of the working group blogs found at Joomla.org are down.

No problem, right? I can can always visit some of the blogs I have listed in my blogroll. However, you'll also find Jeff Eaton's blog (Drupal) has been down for some time. Recently, JoeJoomla's blog has also been offline. Perhaps, it is time I find something else to do for relaxation...like talk to the wife. That's a new idea...and a good one too.

Alldrupalthemes.com did a performance comparision between Joomla 1.5 & Drupal 6.1. As the author of the post infers, the numbers collected may not mean much to the user in the "real world" and limitations in the test results should be noted. Nevertheless, numbers that compare Drupal and Joomla performance are always interesting.

The conclusions drawn from the results are:

1. Drupal is significantly faster than Joomla in all 4 setups
2. Drupal cuts down pageload time by ~74% when caching is enabled on the fresh install and ~86% with the more populated setup
3. Joomla cuts down pageload time by ~23% on the fresh install and ~20% on the more populated setup

These numbers are interesting and I bet the study pulls in a lot of visitors for All Drupal Themes. Not only are Drupal and Joomla users interested in these type of posts, but so are potential users shopping around the first time for a CMS. As always, you should judge a CMS by what it does for you and not what it does for others.

One of the neat things about managing a site like CMSReport.com is that discussion on a topic can happen when you least expected. This is exactly what happened in the comment section of a rather benign post regarding a Latin American University's use of the content management system, Joomla! I was thanked by Open Source Community's Amy Stephen, also a Joomla! user, for posting an excerpt from one of the Joomla! working group blogs. Instead of a "you're welcome" I decided to ask some questions that have been puzzling me about the Joomla! community for some time.

Instead of hiding that discussion, I've attached the comments so far in the conversation. I'd really like to continue the discussion further with other Joomla! users. I think this is a good discussion for anyone like me who is trying to get to know Joomla! and its community better. Before I continue, let me share with you two personal motives for why I want to strike a conversation about Joomla!

1. I'm considering using Joomla! for a project. While I've installed and played with Joomla! many times (mostly 1.0.x though recently 1.5), I've never actually used Joomla! for a live production site.
2. Converstations with Joomla! user now using Drupal. While attending a recent Drupal Meetup, I spent my time talking about Joomla! and SharePoint. There was a new Drupal user at the meeting who was frustrated with the short-comings of Joomla! and was beginning to migrate over to Drupal. However, he still spoke highly of Joomla! and its community. It was an interesting one-on-one converstation in that while he wanted to like Drupal, he didn't quite get Drupal. It struck me that while I have wanted to like Joomla!, I have never really understood Joomla!. I left that Drupal meetup wanting to know more about Joomla!

So there is there is my motive for wanting to have more discussion about Joomla! In a nutshell, I want to like Joomla!, I just don't quite get it. Let's continue the discussion we've already started and help more non-Joomla! users like me out.

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."

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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.

The Joomla! community just completed migrating their forum from SMF over to phpBB3. Brad Baker posted some of the details on Joomla.org's use of phpBB3 for their forum. In part, some of the move to phpBB stemmed from Joomla.org's discomfort from bridging GPL applications with non-GPL applications. Baker answers the question in his own way.

Why did we move to phpBB3?
Good question, and there is a simple answer. Whilst SMF was great for us, it is not licensed under GPL, and as a result many of our users who like to follow the choices we make were going to run in to integration issues in the future. As well as that, the team at phpBB have been great, with many of them offering to help, especially with the conversion.
In any case, we’re not going back, and the future is phpBB3!

Beyond a few minor tweaks, it looks as if Joomla.org was able to convert SMF over to phpBB with very few issues. Considering the Joomla community forum usually has hundreds of users on line at the same time, this is no small move for a forum to make the switch to new software. Congratulations to Joomla!