Joomla! is an open source content management system platform for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web application framework. It is written in PHP, stores data in MySQL and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization
Joomla! has been released under the GNU General Public Licence.
History
Joomla! came into being as the result of the fork of Mambo by the development team on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was trademarked by Miro International Pvt Ltd, who formed a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose to fund the project and protect it from lawsuits. The development team claimed that many of the provisions of the foundation structure went against previous agreements made by the elected Mambo Steering Committee, lacked the necessary consultation with key stake-holders and included provisions that violated core open source values.
The development team created a web site called OpenSourceMatters to distribute information to users, developers, web designers and the community in general. The project team leader Andrew Eddie, AKA "MasterChief" wrote an open letter to the community which appeared on the announcements section of the public forum at mamboserver.com.
A thousand people had joined the opensourcematters.org web site within a day, most posting words of encouragement and support, and the web site received the slashdot effect as a result. Miro CEO Peter Lamont gave a public response to the development team in an article titled "The Mambo Open Source Controversy - 20 Questions With Miro". This event created controversy within the free software community about the definition of "open source". Forums at many other open source projects were active with postings for and against the actions of both sides.
In the two weeks following Eddie's announcement, teams were re-organized, and the community continued to grow. Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) assisted the Joomla! core team beginning in August 2005, as indicated by Moglen's blog entry from that date and a related OSM announcement. The SFLC continue to provide legal guidance to the Joomla! project.
On August 18, 2005, Andrew Eddie called for community input on suggested names for the project. The core team indicated that it would make the final decision for the project name based on community input. The core team eventually chose a name that was not on the list of suggested names provided by the community.
On September 1, 2005 the new name, "Joomla!", was announced. It is the English spelling of the Arabic word jumla (جملة) meaning "all together" or "as a whole", as well as "sentence" (as in, phrase).
On September 6, 2005, the development team called for logo submissions from the community, invited the community to vote on the logo preferred, and announced the community's decision on September 22, 2005. Following the logo selection, brand guidelines, a brand manual, and a set of logo resources were then published on October 2, 2005 for the community's use.
Joomla! (Joomla 1.0.0) was released on September 16, 2005. It was a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.2.3 which, itself, was combined with other bug and moderate-level security fixes. Joomla! won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in both 2006 and 2007.
On October 27, 2008, PACKT Publishing announced Johan Janssens the "Most Valued Person" (MVP) for his work as one of the lead developers of the 1.5 Joomla Framework and Architecture. In 2009 Louis Landry received the "Most Valued Person" award for his role as Joomla architect and development coordinator.
Joomla! version 1.5 was released on January 22, 2008. The most recent release (November 4, 2009) is 1.5.15. View the full 1.5. version history. At the end of June 2009 an alpha version of 1.6 has been made available for testing purposes.
By October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report reached the conclusion that Joomla! is the web's most popular open source content management system. That conclusion was based on an extensive analysis of rate of adoption patterns and brand strength and was backed by a survey of users.
Structure of Joomla!
Plugins and Extensions
The Joomla! package consists of many different parts, which allow modular extensions and integrations to be made easily. An example of such are extensions called "Plugins". (Previously known as "Mambots".) Plugins are background extensions that extend Joomla! with new functionality. The WikiBot, for example, allows the author of Joomla! content to use "Wikitags" in Joomla! articles which will auto-create dynamic hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles when displayed.
In addition to Plugins, more comprehensive extensions are available. There are over 3,000 extensions for Joomla! available via the Extensions Directory. For example, there are several forms extensions for Joomla: perForms, Fabrik (formely Mosforms), and bfForms (formerly Joomla Forms). "Components" allow webmasters to perform such tasks as build a community by expanding user features, back up a website, translate content, create URLs that are more friendly to search engines, and add shopping cart functionality for an e-commerce website. "Modules" perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc., to be inserted within the base Joomla! code.
Many templates and extensions are free of charge. But there are also commercial parties that provide dedicated extensions and/or services related to the Joomla! platform.
SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA
|
