Joomla

Today, we received an announcement from the folks at Joomla! which we couldn't pass up. The Joomla CMS has been downloaded more than 50 million times. Just as impressive, Joomla is currently being download at 1 million downloads a month.

A constant worry of mine as CMS Report's editor is that we won't have enough articles to publish and give you reason to visit this little site of ours. Luckily, authors and contributors with interest in content management systems constantly prove that such my worries are unnecessary. This year almost 900 articles were submitted to CMS Report. I can't tell you how grateful I am for every article that was submitted to our site. Of those 900 submissions, we deemed only 300 of those articles worthy to publish based on quality of the writing and whether we felt the story was of interest to our readers.

Years ago, I quickly discovered there was great public interest in comparisons of open source content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. When you throw WordPress into the mix and you can attract an even greater audience. Despite how much traffic such headlines draw people in, CMS Report has been pretty selective when we provide or point to such articles. There is some uncertainty whether there is genuine value being provided in feature comparison articles which is why I've shied away from them in recent years.

A couple years ago, if you would have asked me what I thought about Joomla! I would have told you I think they've lost their way. Their community of developers seemed to be searching on how best to innovate and take risks with a well established stable content management system. I feared that the open source group was stuck looking back and that all we could expect was dull incremental changes to their CMS. Despite the fear, I knew better. Open source communities have a way of reevaluating their priorities and creating spectacular results where you least expect them to do so.

Yesterday, The Joomla! Project and Community announced the availability of Joomla CMS 3.2.0 Stable. Since the release of 3.1.5, over 1085 commits have been made to the code base with 50 different people contributing to commits. But this release has a lot more than just bug fixes and includes a host of long awaited features for the open source content management system.

Some of the new features in Joomla 3.2 include:

The Joomla! project recently released a new version of their flagship content management system, Joomla 3.1.4. This is a maintenance release with no security fixes. While most of the updates are technical and will likely only be of interest to developers and site maintainers, there are also a few user interface tweaks here and there. For example, this version will now show the Joomla username in the administrative area.

Specific feature enhancements for Joomla 3.1.4 include the following:

A few days ago, the Joomla Project introduced a new version of their content management system, Joomla! 3.1. As usual with these updates, Joomla 3.1 introduces a number of changes and bug fixes. While better late than never, the most significant new feature in this release is dynamic tagging across content types.

Tags are not just for articles but is also integrated tagging into other areas of the Joomla core that made sense. Extension developers will be happy to note that tagging in Joomla 3.1 also provides the necessary API changes to integrate Tags with extensions.  Extension developers will also have the ability to develop innovative ways to use tagging beyond what is in the core CMS.

Sitting on my desktop the past few weeks has been an eBook from the Aluent Group, Drupal and Joomla!: A Comparison of Project Processes and Costs. I probably would have not read this eBook if it wasn't for an acquaintance of mine, Justin Kerr, letting me know that he was a co-author of the book. I'm lucky to have read the book because I think Justin Kerr as well as co-authors Robert Nowak and Jet Pixel have hit a home run in their review and comparison of Drupal and Joomla.

Recently, the fine folks at CMS-Connected gave me the opportunity to become a periodic guest for the CMS in the Spotlight segment of their show. CMS-Connected is an hour-long monthly news webcast that focuses on the content management industry. For the January show we had Joomla! in the spotlight, but once we went live I soon found myself challenged to adequately cover the CMS given short period of time and format.

Update: A recording of January's show can now be found on the CMS-Connected site. Also, a continued video discussion on Joomla! can be found here at CMS Report.