Joomla

When I read the stories we post here at CMS Report, I am reminded how quickly the CMS market continues to evolve and mature. Every year, I worry that there is nothing "new" to write about in this information system niche only to have the developer, user, or owner of a CMS push another new story idea toward my screen. This time around when looking for the top ten content management stories of the year, I concluded we didn't have ten great CMS stories for 2011. Instead, I found more than two dozen great CMS stories for 2011.

Below are the top ten stories of 2011 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list are ranked based on the rate they were viewed since they first appeared at CMSReport.com.

Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2011

1. The 2011 Open Source Awards
2. Google+ first week of use review
3. 10 New Content Management Systems via CMS Focus
4. Another new term: Social Content Management
5. CMS Expo 2011 Series
6. Liferay Marketplace and Liferay Portal 6.1
7. CMS Redefined: Cloud. Mobile. Social
8. CMS Report upgrades to Drupal 7
9. DotNetNuke, Drupal, Liferay, and SharePoint in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals
10. CMS in the Fast Lane: Joomla! 1.7
    

Last weekend, digital agency water&stone, released their 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. I consider this report one of the few non-bias and detailed surveys that come across my desk each year. The report isn't perfect, but the report does help give a good snapshot on the state of who's who in the world of open source content management systems.

You are most definitely going to want to take a look at the details in the report. The findings in this year’s report were based on a survey of more than 2,500 CMS users and additional research into a wide variety of measures of market share and brand strength. I'm still combing through the survey and taking note of the interesting individual nuggets of information that can be found in the results of the survey.

Not surprisingly, the report confirms the ranking position of open source's three most dominate Web content management systems in the market. The press release itself summarizes the results this way:

PHP-based systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal continue to dominate the web content management space. But, while the Big Three remain unchanged from last year, the Report concludes that WordPress retains a clear lead in the face of decreasing competition from Joomla!.

The decreasing competition from Joomla! can be seen most noticeably in the decrease of installations reported by the survey respondents in 2011 compared to 2010. The survey does note that this dramatic drop is likely due to the Joomla! community aggressively promoting the survey last year. This year, the promotion efforts were not coordinated and less influential. I only point this out because this is an example of where the report isn't "perfect" via inconsistencies in the yearly survey sample introducing  a margin of error in the trend comparisons. 

Using Facebook and Twitter, Steve Burge has compiled a list of social media responses to the question, "Why does Joomla rock?". It's an interesting list of 40 tweets and FB status messages and he's conveniently categorized the responses into short answers to the question.

Why does Joomla Rock?

This week, Joomla! 1.7 was officially released to the public. New features in this new version of the popular open source content management system include:

The roots for CMS Expo run deep with Joomla!. If you're looking for experts representing the Joomla! open source community, this is the place to be. I've been looking forward to this presentation on Molajo which follows a Tour Joomla! presentation I've also been watching. I'm here not only because of the impressive speakers, Jen Kramer and Amy Stephen, but also because I sense that Molajo offers something new and different for the Joomla! community.

With Facebook recently announcing it surpassed the 500 million user mark, and Joomla powering over 2.5% of all websites, the integration of both is a natural fit for growing your site and brand both easily and organically.

The newest release of JFBConnect, version 3.2, now makes that integration even more powerful! Updated features include a rich wall posting feature on registration and login, full Facebook Open Graph support, automatic comments and like boxes throughout your Joomla site, and additional profile fields during registration.

These enhancements are all in addition to existing features such as one-click registration, customizable profile import into multiple 3rd party extensions, automatic logging in of Facebook users, and all of the Facebook social widgets such as Like, Comments, Fanbox and more.

Rich Wall Posts

With rich wall posts during registration or login, you're sure to get noticed by Facebook users! Simply fill out the message, image, and link to post when any user registers or logs in and JFBConnect takes care of the rest.

Open Graph Support

For the blogger, the most difficult day of the year has to be April Fools' Day. This is the day where jokes are played and stories are made  up. Computer geeks and CMS junkies easily get into the spirit of this celebrated day by pulling all kinds of online pranks. One of my fondest April Fools memories is from 2007 when the official Japanese and Russian Drupal sites migrated for a day from the Drupal CMS over to Joomla!. Good times, good times. The folks over at ocProducts have gotten into the 2011 April Fools spirit by announcing ocPortal 7 with HTML6.

I need your help! Please help me keep track of all the CMS related April Fools' stories that you find online.  Please feel free to add to my list by of content management pranks via a comment below or through Twitter. If you prefer to tweet the story instead I suggest we start using the Twitter hashtag: #aprilfoolscms.

List of Fake Content Management Stories on April Fools Day 2011

1. ocPortal - ocProducts announces ocPortal 7 with HTML6
2. Drupal - Announcing CertifiedToSUCK.com
3. TYPO3 - New paradigm for TYPO3 4.6 development
4. Drupal - Announcing the Drupal Retail Store
5. Joomla - Joomla Templates from YOOtheme
6. Real Story Group  - No more content management
7. Sharpened.net - The End of the Keyboard and Mouse
8. IBM developerWorks - Scrum Alliance 2.0
9. CMS Made Simple - Intuit Announces Acquisition of CMS Made Simple
10. Enano - Enano merges with Joomla!
11. EpiServer - EPiFAX 1.0 Released
12. Plone - Plone Announces New Release Naming Scheme Effective April 1

Joomla, the world’s most popular open source CMS (content management system), announced the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6. Users will be able to download the latest version effective this evening from the Joomla website. Designed to offer enhanced site control and a more polished user experience, Joomla 1.6 delivers a variety of new tools to improve website management and access, a more robust organizational structure for content control, and various other user-experience improvements throughout the software.

“With new features and capabilities such as the hierarchical design of the access control system, semantic XHTML layouts, one-click extension updates and multi-language functionality, Joomla 1.6 has evolved to become the most user-friendly and powerful tool to develop a web presence,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a not-for-profit created to provide organization, legal, and financial support to the Joomla project. “This has been accomplished through the tireless feedback and work on 1.6 by the thousands of members of the Joomla community over the past year.”

Joomla’s ease-of-use and extensibility has made it the most popular and downloaded open source website software in the industry today (it has been downloaded more than 22 million times). It is used for everything from small personal websites to the backend management for some of the largest enterprises and highest traffic sites on the Web, including sites operated by Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald’s and many more.

Key Features in Joomla 1.6:

• New Access Control System – Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content.
• Unlimited Depth Organizational Model – Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.
• One-Click Extension Updates – Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.
• Semantic XHTML Layouts – Provides a better baseline for content presentation.
• Multi-language Functionality – Allows site builders to implement a multi-language site.

In addition, developers and implementers will enjoy the new ability Joomla 1.6 provides in allowing extensions to be built with granular control and permissions. This makes it easier to create more advanced, enterprise-focused applications and extensions for Joomla. Furthermore, there are numerous improvements in areas like code reuse, and considerable success in ensuring the stability of application programming interfaces via unit testing.

“The current Joomla Platform provides developers with the tools they need to rapidly build the Web of the future,” said Ron Severdia, a member of the Joomla production leadership team. “Although 1.6 is being released today, the Joomla production team is not resting on its laurels. We’re hard at work developing even more powerful Joomla features for the future, such as new search capabilities and new ways to leverage website content.”

Visit https://www.joomla.org/ to download Joomla 1.6 today.

For a long time I’ve been really interested in performance aspects of content management systems and smarter blogging systems. This is the reason for my decision to test some of the popular systems on a workbench and to get some technical information about these systems.

The test was quite simple. I installed the packages on my sandbox server and added a function (cip-bench()) to the installation. Then I ran the index page with the default template and configuration. The data I got from the test was limited on the raw index page after the installation. I picked up 5 aspects for the test:

• The first one was the memory usage of the system
• The execution time
• Executed database queries
• How many database tables exist
• And the last parameter shows how many files are required.

It is interesting to see how different some CMS solve their tasks. I was surprised of some results for example 399 database queries of contenido.

To sum up this test I was impressed by chyrp. It’s delivered with an elegant backend and I think it has got a lot of potential to become more popular and famous. The memory usage of wordpress seems to be improved in contrast to previous versions.

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Packt Publishing recently announced the finalists in each of the categories for their 2010 Open Awards. While award categories for content management systems are still included, this year Packt is also adding additional flavors of open source projects to be judged. The new award categories include awards for most promising open source project, e-commerce applications, graphics software, and JavaScript libraries.

The Voting for the winners in each of the categories ends on November 5, 2010.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges in each category to be announced on November 15, 2010.