'Net Features : joomla

Time for Another Look at Joomla?

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 19:45:00 GMT

It's not often that you'll be in the market for a new content management system, but should you, Joomla might be one to make it onto your shortlist.

The popular open source CMS this week announced that it has been downloaded more than 36 million times. To put that into perspective, that means approximately 3 percent of the Web is running on Joomla. While difficult (though not impossible) to determine if those millions downloads are actually active websites using the CMS, it does indicate that there's some serious interest in the solution which will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

Joomla 3.0, which was released in September 2012, focused on optimizing the CMS for mobile devices. As the Web becomes increasingly mobile, businesses are looking for best of breed offerings and Joomla, which has a long list of Fortune 500 users and numerous governmental organizations, can certainly fit the bill. But it's mobile readiness isn't really what motivates designers and developers to choose a CMS - it's the functionality (and Joomla has plenty of it). More than 1500 extensions have been introduced since November of 2011, which many (including myself) will further drive interest in the platform.

"It is an exciting time for Joomla given its strong position powering almost 3.0 percent of the web," said Paul Orwig, President, Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. "Joomla is truly a collaborative community-driven software project developed with the feedback gathered from nearly 2.7 million Joomla forum posts, more than 587,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 10,000 Joomla extensions. We applaud all who have been involved and helped us reach this milestone."

Student Developers Try to Crack Joomla's Core

Michael Garrity — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:00:00 GMT

The widely used open-source content management system (CMS) Joomla will be participating in the Google Summer of Code program to allow students 18 and older to contribute to the company’s CMS core.

Google Summer of Code is an international program that gives students stipends (up to $5,000) to write code for open-source projects.

Eight different students will each be working on a separate project, and when they’re finished their work will be considered by Joomla for inclusion in its platform. Among the assignments are creating APIs for integrating Facebook and Google services onto a Joomla-powered website, MediaWiki APIs and multi-language options for Joomla installation.

Summer of Code ends on August 24, but the codes won’t be moved immediately into the Joomla CMS core; rather, they will continue to be developed, and may even be used by extension developers. Many of the projects involved in the program are focused on the Joomla platform, providing the infrastructure for the future development of the CMS and other applications that build upon it.

The Joomla platform generously allows developers to create multi-purpose and multi-device apps (including mobile and cloud computing applications) and enterprise systems that can be run independently of its core CMS offering.

Students working on Joomla projects span the globe, coming from Brazil, Sri Lanka, the United States, Romania and France.

Ten New Joomla Extensions Worth Trying

Linc Wonham — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:30:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Joomla announced that it had surpassed 30 million downloads in its brief but, many would say, brilliant history. That’s about 8 million downloads in the past year alone for an impressive 40-percent adoption rate since the end of March 2011.

Among the biggest factors behind Joomla’s increasing popularity and rapid growth is the talented community of developers that has produced more than 2,000 new Joomla extensions in that time period. There are now more than 9,200 Joomla extensions overall, but the past few months have been particularly memorable in terms of both production and quality.

So, to celebrate the open-source content management system’s recent milestone, below is a list of 10 recently released Joomla extensions that you may not have had the opportunity to try yet:

CSS3 Image Hover Module
Added in March 2012, the module will add a CSS3 animated hover effect over an image. Simply roll over your image to reveal a title, some text and a link. With six transition styles to pick from, a color chooser and fields to enter your title, info and link, this module can be used in almost any situation to add some flair to your images.

JoomDalf
Also added less than a month ago, this magic tool is earning rave reviews right out of the gates from users. JoomDalf works with all WYSIWYG Editors in Joomla to insert column layouts, tabs, accordians, togglers, videos, buttons and just about anything else you would want on your site. Regardless of what template you use, JoomDalf can enhance your layout without any coding and just one click of a button and some simple forms to fill in.

RS Media Gallery
Added in late February 2012, this new extension lets you upload, edit and publish your pictures easily. Create galleries, modify them on the fly and publish them on your website as a collection of images, a theatre or simply as a presentation slider. Dynamic AJAX filters can be used to select the images you want to work with. Images can be published, tagged, moved and removed with no more loading times, no more refreshing the page, and all on one screen.

Josetta
Added in March 2012, Josetta is a multilingual content manager for Joomla 2.5+, designed for ease of use, forward compatibility and performance. This extension facilitates the translation of existing Joomla content in several languages by one or more translators with little or no knowledge of Joomla. Translators can easily monitor items that have already been translated and those that have not.

Form Maker
Just added on Leap Day, this form making extension allows users to set all the parameters such as colors and fonts. The size of each element of the form can be set as well, and the back end interface is intuitive and user-friendly, even for those without any scripting and programming experience.

Complete Image Styles
Added in March 2012, this extension provides a full collection of styles for images and brings together all the standard and new styles that appeared with the growth of CSS. Styles like border, shadow, rounded corners, frame, embossed, perspective, lifted corners, raised box, cutout, glowing, reflection, curves, captions and others can be applied alone or in combination.

J2Store
Also added on February 29, this shopping cart for Joomla integrates with the Article Manager and provides a facility to upload your digital products like PDFs so that users can offer these files for a price. You can now sell PDFs, images, music files and more with your own Joomla store.

jQuery Easy
Added in October 2011, this extension is meant to clean and prepare the front and back ends for the use of jQuery alongside the Mootools libraries. There is no need to add code into the template or screw around with the Joomla core, simply a quick and easy plugin for using jQuery on your Joomla site without any conflicts.

Code7 Responsive Accordion Module
Speaking of jQuery, this modern responsive jQuery extension was added in March 2012 to display articles in a responsive and good looking module. Loads in jQuery with no conflict, displays articles from selected categories and can limit the amount of articles.

Smart Slider
Also added in October 2011 and just recently updated, this is considered by many to be the perfect slider extension for Joomla. Features and capabilities include frontpage slideshow, image slider, image gallery, carousel gallery, content slider/tabs, highlighted content, banner slider, vertical and horizontal accordion sliders, product slideshow, FAQ box and much more.

Joomla Downloads Surpass 30 Million

Linc Wonham — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 03:00:00 GMT

Joomla, one of the Web’s most popular open-source content management systems (CMS), just announced that it has been downloaded more than 30 million times.

The company attributes its continued growth to the following factors:

• An aggressive development roadmap – With the release of Joomla 1.7 in July 2011, the CMS began adhering to a six-month release cycle meaning more product enhancements being introduced more often. These new features have included multi-database support, one-click version updating, pre-defined search options and language-specific font settings.

• An explosion of extensions – More than 2,000 Joomla extensions have been introduced since March 2011. These extensions developed by Joomla’s community of thousands of developers provide added features not found in the core Joomla CMS. These extensions have driven Joomla’s widespread adoption in every imaginable industry from non-profits to some of the world’s largest financial institutions. Click here to see WM's list of 10 new Joomla extensions worth trying.

• A significant number of government agencies adopting Joomla – Joomla powers about 3,100 government agencies’ websites, blogs and Intranets. Some features that have driven government adoption include one-click version updates, access control oversight, multilingual capabilities and the Joomla platform that enables developers to build multi-purpose, multi-device applications such as mobile and cloud computing apps and enterprise business systems that can run independently of the core CMS.

Organizations using Joomla aren’t just isolated to government agencies, obviously, as one research firm recently reported that Joomla powers at least 1.6 million websites.

“It is an exciting time for Joomla given its strong position powering 2.7 percent of the Web combined with its unique opportunity to influence the next wave of mobile and cloud web development,” says Paul Orwig, the new president and former treasurer of Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. “The platform split that enables Joomla to be used for developing mobile and cloud computing apps is a welcomed new wave of innovation for the Joomla community.”

Joomla was downloaded about 22 million times as of the end of March 2011, meaning its adoption rate has grown about 40 percent over the last year.

What’s New in Joomla 2.5

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:27:00 GMT

Open-source content management system Joomla has released version 2.5. Joomla has adopted a six-month release cycle recently so expect future developments (and coverage) to come more often.

Several new features have been released in this version including advanced search functionality (including natural language search, auto-complete and stemming), automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates from the control panel, and most importantly, the CMS now includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server (previous versions were compatible only with MySQL databases).

“Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than 1.6 million websites worldwide. It ensures companies and organization, both large and small, will save even more money and time by adopting Joomla,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters.

“No longer will Joomla developers be tied down to a particular database or have to spend more money and time integrating other software to get Joomla to communicate with their database. This enhances Joomla’s scalability immensely.”

Best of 2011 - Content Management Systems

Michael Garrity — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:00:00 GMT

The right content management system (CMS) can make all the difference in the world when it comes to Web success, especially for small businesses without big budgets to dedicate to IT and Web development (although some of the largest brands in the world utilize content management systems as well, so it’s hard not to stress their importance).

If you’re not already using a CMS, you probably should be (considering it, at least); and if you are, are you sure that it’s the best option? Here are five CMS companies who had great years in 2011, and could be your saving grace in 2012.

Joomla
You’ve probably at least heard of Joomla before. Because it is a free open source website creation tool, it often gets compared to Drupal as a sort of WordPress.org knockoff, but in reality it is a much better system. Like both WordPress and Drupal, Joomla allows you to build websites and Web applications, and you can increase their functionality and flexibility by adding “extensions” (feature add-ons similar to WordPress plugins). As a plus, the most updated version of Joomla is even easier for new users to manage thanks in part to refined admin panel, which makes it ideal for some not-so-savvy business owners looking to make it big on the Web.

concrete5
Though aimed at marketers, this free open source CMS is a useful tool for any Web professional, specifically because users are able to edit content on the site directly from the page. This primary feature provides “blocks” that can contain text, images or more complicated content like image slideshows, comments systems, file lists, maps and more. The CMS also allows users to connect their websites to the concrete5 Marketplace to automatically upgrade software and downloaded or purchased add-ons.

ImpressCMS
This simple, secure and flexible community-developed CMS is a great fit for businesses of any size. It is database-driven and fully modularized so that users can install the modules that possess the features they need and don’t have to bother with those that they don’t. It also features multi-byte language support, a theme-based skinnable interface and worldwide support through the ImpressCMS community.

CMS MadeSimple
CMS MadeSimple is a free, lightweight content management solution that is especially applicable for smaller sites. Its robust user interface includes a Web-based administration section for theme, template and stylesheet development, the installation (and updating) of add-on modules, configuring blocks of content on a page and managing user groups and permissions.

Etomite
For those who need to bolster their SEO practices, Etomite is the ideal CMS. Because it allows the end user to control almost everything about a website, from layout to meta tag generation, users can more easily optimize their sites for search engine results pages. Some of the key features include: Word processor-like (WYSIWYG) document editing to add tables, images and formated text to a page without HTML knowledge, a modern and intuitive interface, template-driven page design and free support. In addition, this CMS can also be incorporated with AJAX functionality without any AJAX system knowledge through a backend editor.

CMS Watch: Here Comes Joomla

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:00:00 GMT

Open source content management system Joomla has had quite the year, announcing today that downloads have risen 38 percent from December 2010 to December 2011, brining the total number of downloads to a whopping 27 million.

It's not just the downloads, the rest of the Joomla ecosystem seems pretty healthy too. Joomla extensions developed by outside vendors increased by 41 percent annually to 8,475 as of October 31, 2011, and the number of forum users jumped 23 percent annually as of October 31, 2011, meaning more and more people are interacting to help shape Joomla.

"We've seen double and in some cases triple digit growth in Joomla's adoption since 2007," said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, the not-for-profit created to provide organizational, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. "Part of what's driven this massive number of downloads is an explosion of community involvement in the project."

Joomla Mailer from MailChimp

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:23:00 GMT

Email service provider MailChimp today announced the launch of Joomailer, a new integration for the popular Joomla! platform.

Joomla! users are able to manage MailChimp lists, create campaigns and manage reports from their Joomla! dashboard, essentially replicating most of the MailChimp web-based features in a 3rd party site. This is the first extensive integration with a CMS for MailChimp.

The Joomla! community has been both active and vocal (in a good way) of late about the popular content management systems' new version (1.6). Joomla is currently powering almost 2.7% of all websites today. MailChimp's integration with Joomla in reality makes it quite late to the game. Constant Contact, Aweber, GetResponse, GraphicMail all have modules/extensions and a number of other freestanding extensions for all variants of email like autoresponders exist as well.

If you'd like to learn more about Joomla! stay tuned for Joomla in June - a new series launching from Website Magazine next month. Also, consider joining Website Magazine at Joomla Day Chicago in August.

Essential Social Sharing Tools for Websites

Mike Phillips — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:30:00 GMT

Social media has become a standard in Web business and that includes design and development. In the past, providing eye-catching and functional social profile links and sharing options was a cumbersome process; involving hard-coding and scouring the Web for usable images.

Not anymore. Amateur bloggers (and sophisticated ones, too) can deploy any number of widgets with one click. Many of the social widgets also offer developers the ability to modify and implement the tools and offer APIs.

Enabling social sharing and providing links to various social touch points is not optional - today's online business environment demands it. Fortunately there are tools to make it easy. Below are just a few.*

AddThis is one of the most recognizable and popular social widgets available. According to the website, AddThis is featured on more than 7 million domains. The advantage of that, is that users have been exposed to the widget repeatedly, meaning most are likely quite familiar, and therefore adept, at using it. AddThis also offers some pretty insightful analytics (which can be emailed to you), including search and referrers, social mentions and audience interests. There are plenty of display options with AddThis, so look around the site. ShareThis is similar.

Share and Follow (pictured, at left) is a hot item in the blogging world. Call it a social sticky widget or floating sidebar widget, it allows users one-click access to your social profiles and sits in a fixed position; so that even when a user scrolls down or up, the widget stays on the side of the page - allowing for users to share whenever it strikes their fancy. Although constantly present, it's attractive and relatively small, so it does not feel intrusive. It also enables users to share content. Add in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp ... just about anything. The WordPress plugin supports WP e-Commerce, so product pages can be shared and 'liked.' There are several choices when it comes to "follow me" widgets but this one is one of the most popular, and one of the best. Social Slider is similar.

Sexy Bookmarks (pictured, at right) is another sharing tool but, unlike AddThis, it comes in a slick package. You might even call it "sexy." Just about every necessary social network is supported, and RSS. It's whimsical design and hover-over effects are a good option for bloggers with a bit of lighter atmosphere, perhaps not so great for business publishers. Sexy Bookmarks is very easy to install for WordPress, Blogger and Joomla.

*Many plugins can be unstable, or you might need support. Be sure to read user reviews about these tools before using them, and look for an active community.

Five Ways to Build Your Own Groupon

Mike Phillips — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:00:00 GMT

Group coupon buying has overrun the Internet. A $6 billion buyout offer of Groupon.com from Google should be enough evidence of that. Now, Groupon is getting hit from all sides. LivingSocial has turned up the heat, Yelp.com has introduced group coupon buying, Google is working on their own solution, Facebook won't be far behind and even local websites and newspapers are in on the rush.

Why aren't you?

You can be, by using one of these group buying options below.

Chompon.com provides full-scale group buying functionality and, according the them, a site can be set up in under three minutes. That is, if you have deals ready. The software can be white-labeled for full branding, social widgets are available to help spread your deals, daily emails can be set up, analytics are provided and there's even the option of setting up an iPhone app.

DealCurrent.com not only provides group buying software for your website but also offers marketing and sales help and training, affiliate tracking, merchant agreements and customer service, among other options. Deal Current also handles payment processing.

PoweredByTippr is a little more labor-intensive but it might be the most brandable solution out there. They claim to have, "...the industry’s only patented white-label platform, providing the deepest branding options and widest array of configuration options such as three different deal types, incentive/sharing credit management, progressive account creation, Single Sign On (SSO), mobile and iPhone apps, Facebook connect, sales agent commission reporting, and advanced analytics." http://www.poweredbytippr.com

GroupDeals for WordPress is a group-buying widget for WordPress administrators. It can be implemented into your existing blog - a good option for those with an existing audience.

EnMasse for Joomla is an extension (just like a widget for WordPress) that just might put the Joomla CMS on the map. This extension was built from the ground up, specifically to handle group deals and even supports a multi-language pack.

Keep in mind that some of these solutions are more hands-on than others - particularly the widgets. So, expect a few bumps in the road. But the opportunities are there.

Joomla! 1.6 Arrives

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 04:08:00 GMT

Popular open-source content management system Joomla! has made available Joomla! 1.6.

This version of the CMS delivers a variety of new tools to improve website management and access, a more robust organizational structure for content control, and various other user-experience improvements throughout the software.

"Joomla 1.6 has evolved to become the most user-friendly and powerful tool yet for developing a web presence,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, which provides support to the Joomla project.

Noteworthy features in Joomla 1.6:

- New Access Control System - Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content.

- Unlimited Depth Organizational Model - Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.

- One-Click Extension Updates - Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.

- Semantic XHTML Layouts - Provides a better baseline for content presentation.

- Multi-language Functionality - Allows site builders to implement a multi-language sit

It is the "one-click extensions" that caught our attention in this release. Our upcoming issue (March 2011) has an article about some of the most important extensions for Joomla users. Definitely don't miss that issue - request a pro-level subscription to Website Magazine today.

Wordpress and Joomla Get Sponsored Comments Plugins

Mike Phillips — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:34:00 GMT

Wordpress and Joomla users looking for a new way to monetize content can now turn to a plugin from TalkAhead. The Sponsored Comments plugin offers ease of integration while allowing publishers to take advantage of an often under-utilized part of a page. Publishers can obtain sponsored comments through their own marketing channels, or through the TalkAhead system that provides advertisers with a network of bloggers using the system on which they can purchase comment space. For publishers, it's a relatively hands-free option for additional revenue. For advertisers, these comments could be used as a sales message, brand message or even a form of reputation management.

From the press release: "Sponsored Comments are paid messages that respond directly to an article. The platform was designed to help marketers, public relations professionals and brand managers respond to stories or issues affecting their company, product or industry, offer commentary, dispel misconceptions, generate leads and start conversations with consumers. Because Sponsored Comment is the first message readers see the moment they've finished reading an article, marketers can target readers while their interest is piqued."

Pricing models are flexible and can be set by individual publishers on a CPM basis. According to TalkAhead's website, CPMs are usually much higher (2-10 times) than standard banners, due to the highly-targeted nature of the surrounding content. Of course, TalkAhead will take their cut - 30 percent of all revenue.

CMS Apps for Small Biz at Network Solutions

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:44:00 GMT

Network Solutions has added several content management systems applications to its product suite including WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Mambo.

"We want to make it as easy as possible for our customers to publish their content online," said Kamalesh Dwivedi, Chief Information Officer for Network Solutions. "These scalable and innovatively integrated content management system applications launched from our Network Solutions Oriented Architecture (NSOA) help our customers by giving them powerful ways to publish, manage and organize a variety of content on their websites with the ease of use our customers expect."

Most web hosting companies offer some form of content management system within their service packages. If you're in the market for a new web host, analyzing which solutions are available before signing a long-term contract is imperative.

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Joomla CMS Gets Some SEO Flavor

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:45:00 GMT

Users of the immensely popular open-source content management system Joomla can SEO their websites with the help of a new product from Joomla software provider iJoomla.

The iJoomla SEO extension for Joomla 1.5 (which sells for $69.99) gives Web professionals control over some important SEO elements with a number of features.

- The Metatag Manager offers the ability to mass edit keywords, descriptions and titles.
- Replace setting allows SEOs to change HTML classes to standard HTML headings.
- Keyword setting allows users to wrap bold and italic tags around specific keywords on articles.
- The Description setting allows SEOs to automatically retrieve the description tag from content and set the length.
- Image setting lets SEOs assign a keyword/phrase to all images on a site or just to those that are missing an alt attribute.
- The Redirect feature allows SEOs to add nofollow rel tags easily and will track the number of click for each created link.

All in all, an excellent plugin/extension for Joomla and one that may prove invaluable to Joomla extensions.

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Open Source Drupal CMS Gets a Nod

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:31:00 GMT

If you're in the market for a content management system (and an open-source one to boot), you might be interested to know that the Packt's Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award (very prestigious in CMS circle) was given to Drupal in the overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000.

Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke. The open-source platform has grown substantially by all accounts of late, downloaded almost 1.5 million times in the last 12 months. It is currently being applied by companies such as Warner Brothers Music, MTV UK, and the New York Observer amongst others.

Finishing in second place and receiving $3,000 was Joomla!, the youngest of the three finalists and a previous winner of the Overall Award. Judges were impressed with Joomla's ease of installation and ability to get a website up-and-running in a short space of time. Particular praise was reserved for its sizeable and enthusiastic community, which has allowed the project to grow so quickly in such a short space of time. In third place and receiving $2,000 was DotNetNuke, the only CMS in the final that is written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. DotNetNuke received positive feedback from judges who were impressed with its ease of development and security implementation features.

The most promising CMS system was SilverStripe. SilverStripe is today exclusively revealed as the winner of the 2008 Most Promising Open Source Content Management System. The SilverStripe project received $2,000, holding off strong competition from CMS Made Simple in the first runner up position with ImpressCMS and MiaCMS finishing joint second runner up.