Joomla

Joomla.org converts community forum from SMF to phpBB

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.

Official release of Joomla 1.5

Joomla LogoI briefly wanted to mention that the stable release of Joomla! 1.5 has finally arrived! Needless to say, there are some very happy people in the open source community to see this version of the content management system go gold.

I haven't taken a serious look at Joomla! 1.5 since Beta 1 and Beta 2 were out the door. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to taking a look at the finished product over the course of the next few weeks. Until then, below is a brief glimpse from the announcement at Joomla.org of what you can expect from version 1.5.

OSC: Amy Stephen's 5,000th post in the Joomla! Community Forum

Amy Stephen, site leader for Open Source Community, submitted her 5,000th post in the Joomla! Community Forum. The Joomla! community makes a big deal out of these type of achievements and we've covered some of their milestones in the past. You know what? It's hard not to celebrate someone else's contributions to open source communities. Congratulations to Amy!

Amy Stephen's 5,000th post in the Joomla! Community Forum

Best Open Source PHP CMS: Joomla wins, Drupal second and e107 third

By golly, Joomla has been awarded as the Best PHP Open Soure CMS in Packt Publishing's 2007 awards.

Joomla! is today revealed as the Award's third category winner, claiming Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. Last year's overall winner came out on top ahead of Drupal in second and e107 in third place and receives $2,000.

Joomla! was selected as the winner in the Best PHP category due to "its good front-end for administrators and end-users, which gives users a simple and traditional company website straight out of the box".

Croatian community site converts from e107 to Joomla

I found this on one of the Joomla blogs, Croatian community site converts from e107.

The biggest Croatian community site outside of Croatia converts to Joomla. Croworld.ca has been around for 3 years, although just recently went through a e107 -> Joomla conversion. We support the Croatian community outside of Croatia by trying to keep everyone in tune with what is going on in the community. 

So why am I posting this here at my site?  Could it be that I want to rub it into the faces of e107 users that they lost another site to Joomla?  Absolutely not!  While croworld.ca is designed well with Joomla, it's actually the content that I'm more interested than the CMS this time around.

Is Joomla! 1.5 RC3 really a release candidate?

I was really surprised not only find out that Joomla! 1.5 is going through a third release candidate, but will likely be followed with more release candidates.  In most projects, the release candidate is a nearly-done final product where the only thing left is to make sure all the i's are dotted and all the t's are crossed.  Not so with Joomla! 1.5.

Johan Janssens's writes in his post, "Is Joomla! 1.5 RC3 really a release candidate?":

InfoWorld reviews five CMS: Alfresco on top and Drupal at the bottom

I'm still in need to read this InfoWorld article in its entirety, but thought it was worth mentioning now.  InfoWorld's Mike Heck has written an article, Open source CMSes prove well worth the price, which reviews and compares five content management systems.  The five CMS under review are Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone.

The good news is that all five CMS ranked Very Good or higher. However, Alfresco was the only CMS that ranked Excellent with a score of 9.2.  Plone 3.0 received the second highest ranking with a score of 8.6.  DotNetNuke and Joomla tied for third and fourth place with a score of 8.4 which put Drupal a fraction lower with a score of 8.3.  While none of these CMS ranked poorly, I'm sure the open source communities are bound to scrutinize over how the individual criteria were scored and ranked.

Is bridging a GPL application with a non-GPL application legal?

Amy Stephen over at Open Source Community has put together a good summary for how differing open source CMS projects have interpreted the impact the GPL has on third-party extensions/modules/plugins/add-ons.  Movement in the Joomla community ensuring GPL compliance for extensions is what prompted her comparisons of license interpretation between Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Wordpress, and XOOPS.