Last week, Open Source Matters released the latest version of the popular Joomla! Open Source Content Management System (CMS). The new version 3.0 is the first in the community’s plans for a Standard Term Support release to complement the Long Term Release. Among the many new features in this release, the big news is mobile management capabilities and tight integration and support for Twitter’s Bootstrap framework (which enables much of the mobile management).
Of course, it’s one of the top open source CMS in the world, along with Joomla! Drupal and WordPress. However, the CMS space is where there are many great choices from the open source community. According to the company, about 3% of sites on the web run his Joomla! This package is available in various languages. There may be other sites running Joomla! More outside the US than inside, Joomla! is truly an international phenomenon.
According to Mark Dexter, one of Joomla!’s leaders, it was very important for the community to be on a regular release cycle. community. Having both standard and extended release cycles allows companies to plan their upgrade and support needs months or years in advance. It also allows developers of thousands of templates and extensions to plan their development around these release cycles.
New releases require many extensions and templates to be upgraded. For this reason, it is not recommended for users of version 2.5 of Joomla! Upgrade immediately. However, users of Joomla version 1.5 should upgrade as a support. Because that version ends with the 3.0 release. A new release of the STS model is published every six months. Version 3.1 will be the next version. A user of version 2.5 will not need to upgrade until version 3.5 is released, and version 2.5 will be supported until his spring of 2014.
A complete list of what’s new in Joomla! 3.0 is:
- Incorporating Twitter Bootstrap into the jui media package.
- New admin template (Isis) and interface that is responsive and suitable for mobile devices.
- A new front-end template –Protostar– built using Twitter Bootstrap.
- Updated an accessible template called Beez3.
- Simplified 3-step installation process.
- PostgreSQL driver. You will now be able to run her Joomla 3.0 site using a PostgreSQL database.
- PHP Memcached driver
- Use JFeed instead of SimplePie for feed management
- Install language packages directly from Extension Manager
- Guest user group present by default
- Allow saving blank articles
- New admin statistics module
- Update TinyMCE to version 3.5.6
- Continuous cleanup of old unused code, files, database fields and tables, and improved table standardization.
- Improved smart search
- Extensive work on code style standardization and consistency
- Unit tests in CMS
- CMS updated system test
- Custom active menu items in menu modules
- Have the SEF plugin add the canonical URL to the head.
- Joomla platform version 12.2
To demonstrate the popularity of Joomla! So Mark gave us some metrics:
- Joomla downloads: 3,4635,938 (as of September 24, 2012)
- Joomla forum members: 580,387 as of September 24, 2012
- Joomla Forum Posts: 2,670,464 (as of September 24, 2012)
No matter how you slice it, you will end up with lots of users and a Joomla! site. I wrote a few weeks ago about Cloudaccess.net hosting his Joomla demo site. The Joomla demo site equates to approximately 20,000 sites per month. WordPress claims to be used by more sites than Joomla. These are very impressive numbers.
Even more impressive is the whole open source content management system. This is indeed an area where open source seems to dominate. With this new regular release cycle, Joomla! has taken a big step towards becoming a trusted enterprise partner for organizations to build their web presence. All in all, a very impressive release from Joomla! Community.
Copyright © 2012 IDG Communications, Inc.
