Open Source: Joomla CMS Dances Off the Mambo Floor

By Scott Frangos | Published Oct 19, 2006

All together now (“Joomla” is Swahili for “all together”), watch the talented former Mambo open source programmers, now aligned with Joomla, twist, turn and spin their mouse wheels in the new Joomla Dance. The tenacious team has announced v1.5, one year after splitting off from the original Mambo project.

The Joomla group has announced that version 1.5 (still in beta) represents “a complete refactoring of the Joomla codebase and leverages a new API that allows developers to deliver more robust and innovative applications.” Seems the team really can do more than one dance too — they do the LDAP, the Web Services, and more.

The goals for the release are to:

Improve usability, manageability, and scalability far beyond the original Mambo foundations.
Expand accessibility to support international communication needs, double-byte characters and Right-to-Left support for Arabic and Hebrew languages.
Extend the integration of external applications through Web Services and remote authentication such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
Enhance the content delivery, template and presentation capabilities to support accessibility standards and content delivery to any destination.
Achieve a more sustainable and flexible framework for component and extension developers.
Deliver backwards compatibility with previous releases of components, templates, modules and other extensions.

If the user community for Joomla is an indication, the team really does have it all together. With 60,000 registered users, 890 extensions for the CMS, 1168 projects by third-party developers on their Joomla Forge, and an Alexa showing their website as the 492nd busiest in the world.

So if you want to dance Open Source, Joomla sounds like a pleasing partner. And keep your eye on this space — rumors are surfacing that future versions of Joomla may choose get friendly with commercial databases, in addition to its current belle of the ball, dear ole MySQL.

What to dig further? If your in the EU environs, you can pick up more details from the Joomla! open source content management speakers and panelists at the SYSTEMS 2006 conference in Munich Germany. This little shin dig will be running next week, kicking off on Monday Oct. 23rd at the New Munich Trade Fair Center. Do a little warm-up by downloading the 1.5 beta now.

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