Archive for May, 2008
We’ve mentioned how Joomla! is being regularly picked up by mainstream media. Most recently, it has been discovered by Information Week scribe, Alexander Wolfe.
In the article, Wolfe touches on the emblematic signature that has drawn so many users to Joomla! His experience — no different to millions of noobs — was one of discovery. Discovery of ease-of-use and power. Power in simplicity in a content management system (CMS), probably best describes his overall experience.
Indeed, his headline “Joomla Rocks, or How to Build a Professional Web Site for No Money Down” speaks volumes about his summary. He goes on to say: “Joomla is technically an open source content management system (CMS), but it’s much for than that. For those of us who’ve been conditioned to think that running a Web site means you’re locked into a hard-to-change, difficult-to-use platform, working with Joomla is a real eye-opener.”
And: “Playing around with Joomla made the awesome possibilities of Web 2.0 really come alive for me, for the first time. (It was also a heck of a lot of fun.) Here’s what I threw together, in not too many hours of playing: Go to alexwolfe.net/joomla”.
What is particularly interesting is Wolfe is actually waxing lyrical about an old Joomla 1.0+ installation. It appears he’s yet to taste the delights of the new refactored Joomla 1.5. One wonders what superlatives he would have revealed had he tried the more powerful and user-friendly 1.5 version.
Johan’s recent post about Joomla! download statistics illustrates the market penetration of this “king” of open source projects. With the project fast approaching downloads of half a million per month, it’s no wonder there is such strong demand for delivery of quality third party extensions, training and support.
It’s a curious thing, this Joomla! phenomena. Pundits like Wolfe are regularly commenting about it in a tone that more often than not acknowledges its maturity to a point where it is viewed as a pillar among all its peers.
On that point we’d tend to agree. However its success is more about the organic word-of-mouth marketing by community members sharing experiences, frustrations and finding solutions. The viral nature of GNU/GPL software has indeed proved it can have mainstream momentum and attract the considered attention of a mainstream pundit such as Wolfe — and with him enjoying the experience to boot.
It’s always amazing to hear the excitement openly expressed by so many first-time-users upon launching their first Joomla! website. And, I hope it further emboldens the spirit of those valuable contributors who donate their time and make the software freely available.
At the end of January 2008 I predicted that Joomla! 1.5 would superseed Joomla! 1.0 in March 2008. I based myself on the download statistics found on the joomlacode.org.
Let’s have a look at the download statistics of the first 4 months of 2008 and see if my prediction turns out to be correct or not.
The below graph is showing the monthly download statistics for both Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5.
Remarks :
Conclusions :
What does this tell us about the uptake of Joomla! 1.5 ? For that we need a graph that shows us the downloads percentage share for both :
Remarks :
Based on this data we can indeed conclude that Joomla! 1.5 has superseded Joomla! 1.0. The uptake of 1.5 has been phenomenal, it reached the same amount of downloads as 1.0 almost immediatly after the release of the stable version.
Joomla! 1.0 isn’t giving up the fight easily. At the moment both technologies are existing jointly besides each other. It will be interesting to see how this evolves in the coming months.
I believe that the further uptake of 1.5 will be dependant on two key factors :
Joomlatools is delighted to announce a third founding member of Joomla! is joining our team. Shayne Bartlett, a New Zealander who hails from Albany, Australia, brings a wealth of experience in all things Joomla! and global contacts in the web industry. Apart from his amazing contribution to Joomla! as a core member as Project Manager and a board member of Open Source Matters, Shayne was a Mambo project core team member too.
Shayne brings the ever-popular newsletter extension for Joomla!, Letterman. Letterman, which was originally developed by Sören Eberharter (of Virtue Mart fame), is very close to release its 1.5 native incarnation — Letterman2.
Shayne says he believes the addition of Letterman2 to the Joomlatools suite further demonstrates our commitment to providing some of the most professional code to the Joomla! marketplace.
“I’m really excited to be part of the Joomlatools team,” he said. “There is no doubting the massive contributions made by Joomla’s principal architect, Johan Janssens and marketing / media guru Pete Russell. They and fellow Joomlatools founders Mathias Verraes and Laurens Vanderput exemplify what open source is all about … the quality code, professionalism and fun just about says it all!”
Shayne, a Kiwi (New Zealander) is engaged to be married early in 2009 with two step children and a two year old son. He is also director of Ramped Technology, a leading Western Australian network management company. You could say he’s always busy and we’re delighted he’s found some time to share with Joomlatools.
If you’re using Joomla! for an intranet, or any site that is closed down completely for all non-registered, there’s a simple trick: put your site in offline mode. Out of the box this will lock down everything for everyone who hasn’t got backend permissions, but there’s a way to change that.
Step one is to put the site offline. There’s an option for that in the Global Configuration. You’d normally use that when making significant changes to your site, to keep users out, but allow managers and administrators in. In our case, we want to allow all registered users. I suppose that with the new ACL in Joomla! 1.6, there will be a place where you can change this. For now, we’ll just make a small hack to /includes/application.php
// Find this line:
if ($this->getCfg('offline') && $user->get('gid') < '23' ) {
//Change it to:
if ($this->getCfg('offline') && $user->get('gid') < '18' ) {
You might also want to adapt the look of the login page to your site. Here we don't need to hack a thing, as we can use template overrides. Copy the file /templates/system/offline.php to /templates/[YOUR_TEMPLATE]/offline.php. It's plain HTML with some PHP tags, so you should have no problem editing it to your liking. Changing the graphics and some text will be sufficient for most people.
If you’re a template designer or extension developer (or if you just like to hack existing extensions), you might want to take a look at J!Dump. I started the project more than a year and a half ago, in the dark ages when Joomla! 1.5 was still in beta. I didn’t have the time to maintain it, but luckily Jens-Christian Skibakk (aka jenscki) stepped up and took over development. This month, a brand new version 1.1 was released.
J!Dump solves some often recurring problems during development. When you want to know what a variable contains, you can use var_dump() or print_r(), wrapped in <pre> tags for readability. With large complex objects, this quickly turns into a mess. Furthermore, the output is mixed in with regular Joomla! output, which makes it even messier. And if you’re var_dump() statement is followed at some point by a redirect, you never even get to see the output.
J!Dump does it differently. When you dump($foo);, the contents of $foo are stored in the session data. At runtime, J!Dump opens a popup window, and shows the dumped variables, using a nice javascript tree. This allows you to dig into the variable a much nicer way than reading hundreds of lines of print_r output.
The best way to get a feel of how J!Dump can make your life easier, is to try it. Simply install both the plugin and the component on your test system and put a dump($some_object); statement in your code somewhere. Check the readme for more info.
Of course there are better ways to debug your applications. The nice thing about J!Dump is that it’s very easy to setup and get started, especially if all you need is a quick insight in the code instead of full-blown debugging.
J!Dump is a free GPL extension, which not only means you can use it as you wish, you’re also encouranged to contribute to it. If you want to add some features, let me know, and I’ll add you to the project.
The book “Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development” by James Kennard mentions J!Dump, as well as J!Code, as being two prominent tools for the developer. Cool!
After the release of 1.5 I took a bit of time off from the project to be able to concentrate fully on my personal and professional live. Like everyone I need to eat too, and while coding on Joomla! is a lot of fun it doesn’t bring food on the table. I must say in the last weeks I really started missing the community interaction. What better than a Joomladay to dive into the community again.
The Joomladay here in Thailand was truly great ! Akarawuth Tamrareang (Kritt), Joomla! community member since day one, did an excellent job putting his second Joomladay together. Last year he had about 100 people showing up. This year the crowd grew to more then 200 people. A full house ! For next year there is already talk of moving to a bigger venue to be able to accommodate 500 people. Who ever said that Joomla! isn’t big in Asia really needs to check again !
I had the privilege to travel to the Malaysian Joomladay last year and I must say there is a clear difference between Asian and Europe. In Europe open source is slowly becoming mainstream, Asia on the other hand is still a proprietary software stronghold.
This makes people like Kritt open source pioneers here in Asia. This second Joomladay is already his 5th Mambo/Joomla! event. He organized his first Mambo meeting event in 2003, long before the first Mamboday took place in Germany. I have started calling him ‘Mister Joomla! Asia’, which makes him smile and rightly so.
On most of the Joomladays I, together with my buddy Buzz Lightyear, give a talk titled : ‘Joomla, To Infitity and Beyond’. For each Joomladay I update my slidedeck with the newest statistics and information about the project. One of the slides shows an overview of the number of hits you get when you type Joomla! in on google.com. Before we announced the name in September 2005, Google only listed 9 hits for the keyword ‘joomla’, in November 2006 this grew to 35 million hits and in November 2007 Google counted 65 million hits. I was astonished to see that today the keyword Joomla! has exceeded 100 million hits on Google.com. Hereby I propose to officially call this : ‘The Joomla! effect.’
