Joomla

A couple weeks ago, I found on my doorstep Hagen Graf's book, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 Beta 1.  The book was sent to me by the book's publisher, Packt Publishing, in hopes that I would review the book on the Joomla! content management system here at CMSReport.com.  While I do not promise to review every book or Internet link that comes my way, I always appreciate the opportunity to do such reviews.  In this case, I was eager to review the book since I have lost track of the new features introduced in version 1.5 since Joomla!

CiviCRM 1.7 has been released. The CiviCRM is the "first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution". CiviCRM is web-based (integrating with Joomla! or Drupal), internationalised, and designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

The following are highlights for CivicCRM 1.7:

"Brad" from Joomla! wrote "RobInk hit the big 10k posts  today." at the Joomla! forum.  He goes on to write:

There is a thread going where you might like to add you congratulations etc.

It’s incredible to reflect upon just how many people have been helped by Rob’s posts, as well as the posts of all those who help out. Did you know, we have 28 members at the moment who have 2000 posts and above, and more than 70 with 1000 posts or more. Now that is CONTRIBUTING!

A special congratulations to Rob, and to everyone else THANKS for your continued help and support.

In a blog on the Joomla! Developer Network, Wilco Jansen posted an article describing the changes that have taken place between Joomla!  1.5's beta-1 and beta-2.

The following are some of the changes in user features for Joomla! 1.5 beta-2 that caught my eye: 

• Implemented caching
• Refactored session management for JSession, database, files, APC, and eAccelerator.
• Complete refactoring of the installer
• Added new archive libraries to better support zip|gzip|tar file extraction
• Several improvements on default Joomla! templates, including support of newest browsers
• Added open-id support
• Further LDAP improvements
• Further improvements on the media manager like the ability to remove multiple files, or image preview option
• Added windows support on the FTP layer

Of the above features changes, I'm probably most interested in the implementation of caching as well as the the refactored session management.  These changes should really help improve Joomla's performance on the server.  Plus, as most of you know, I'm a big fan of eAccelerator and any other tools to get the server humming along.

This fork of Joomla to improve accessibility interested me

Accessible (a8e) Joomla! is a Joomla! fork that conforms to accessibility guidelines and web standards. A8e Joomla! will follow regular Joomla! releases. The project should implode when regular Joomla! finally conforms to the standards.

Accessibility of Internet sites is very huge within the federal government and addressed by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, 1998.

On a recent visit to Drupal's forum I found another post with both Joomla and Drupal in the subject line. Making comparisons between Joomla and Drupal are very common these days as they are currently considered the top two open source content management systems (CMS) out there. The forum post written by Steve Burge contains a link that takes you to a comparison table he did between Joomla and Drupal.

Brad Baker posted on the Joomla! Developer Network an article discussing how one can can contribute to their open source community. While Mr. Baker's article are focused on Joomla!, I think his comments could apply to any open source project. I especially like how he concludes his article.

Developers and users of five content management systems (CMS) have been anxiously waiting for Packt Publishing to announce the winner of their Packt Open Source CMS Award. Packt Publishing is expected to announce on Tuesday, November 14th, the top three CMS along with the winner.

The winning CMS will get US $5,000, the second will get US $3,000 and the third placed finalist will get US $2,000.

As I mentioned a couple months ago, the top five CMS were nominated by the public are all that remain eligible for the award. Those five CMS include:

As we reported earlier this month, a new version of Joomla! is near completion. The development team has released Joomla! 1.5 beta to allow for testing, identify bugs, and offer feedback to the developers. The following is an excerpt from an official announcement at joomla.org:

It was announced by Joomla.org that the Beta for Joomla! 1.5 is expected to be released on October 12th. Some of the goals and features that are to be included in this new version of the content management system are:

• Substantial improvement in usability, manageability, and scalability. The project team's goal is to improve Joomla! "far beyond the original Mambo foundations".

• Expanded accessibility to support internationalisation, double-byte characters and Right-to-Left support for Arabic and Hebrew languages.

• Additional integration of external applications through Web Services and remote authentication such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).