Joomla was the result of a fork of Mambo 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 Joomla 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 Joomla development team created a web site called OpenSourceMatters.org to distribute information to users, developers, web designers and the community in general. A letter was written by the project leader Andrew Eddie which appeared on the announcements section of the public forum at mamboserver.com. A little more than one 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”.[5] 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.[6][7] The SFLC continue to provide legal guidance to the Joomla! project.[8] 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 Romanized spelling of the Swahili word jumla meaning “all together” or “as a whole.”[9] 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.[10] Joomla won the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Award in both 2006 and 2007.[11][12] 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. What is Joomla? Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone. What’s a content management system (CMS)? A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site, much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don’t have to. What are some real world examples of what Joomla! can do? Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example: Corporate Web sites or portals Corporate intranets and extranets Online magazines, newspapers, and publications E-commerce and online reservations Government applications Small business Web sites Non-profit and organizational Web sites Community-based portals School and church Web sites Personal or family homepages Who uses Joomla? MTV Quizilla Here are just a few examples of Web sites that use Joomla: MTV Networks Quizilla (Social networking) – http://www.quizilla.com IHOP (Restaurant chain) – http://www.ihop.com Harvard University (Educational) – http://gsas.harvard.edu Citibank (Financial institution intranet) – Not publicly accessible The Green Maven (Eco-resources) – http://www.greenmaven.com Outdoor Photographer (Magazine) – http://www.outdoorphotographer.com PlayShakespeare.com (Cultural) – http://www.playshakespeare.com Senso Interiors (Furniture design) – http://www.sensointeriors.co.za More examples of companies using Joomla can be found in the Joomla Community Site Showcase. I need to build a site for a client. How will Joomla! help me? Simple Admin interface Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you’re not an advanced user. Many Web hosting services offer a single-click install, getting your new site up and running in just a few minutes. Since Joomla is so easy to use, as a Web designer or developer, you can quickly build sites for your clients. Then, with a minimal amount of instruction, you can empower your clients to easily manage their own sites themselves. If your clients need specialized functionality, Joomla is highly extensible and thousands of extensions (most for free under the GPL license) are available in the Joomla Extensions Directory. Joomla Requirements: What You Need To Start We’ll be working with Joomla version 1.5 for the purposes of this tutorial. If you don’t have the latest version of Joomla, you can download it here. Make sure that you select the full package version rather than the upgrade package. You’ll also need to have access to a server that is compatible with PHP, either on your computer or from your web hosting company. If you don’t have one, you can download XAMPP, an easy-to-set-up Apache server that will allow you to run PHP scripts. You can find a great guide for installing and using XAMPP here. The final ingredient is a MySQL database. For this tutorial, we’ll be interacting with MySQL through a program called phpMyAdmin. Don’t worry, if you’ve downloaded and installed XAMPP, you should have both MySQL and phpMyAdmin included. Installing Joomla 1.5 The process of installing Joomla will differ only slightly depending on if you’re using a localhost on your computer or are installing on a CNA training live server with your web hosting company. I’ll point out the differences where they occur. Step One – Saving The Files When you download Joomla, it usually comes in a zipped (compressed) file. You’ll need to unzip it and save the files to a directory on your web server. If you’re using XAMPP, you’ll need to save the files in the XAMPP/htdocs/ folder. If you plan on creating other sites, you might want to create a new folder similar to XAMPP/htdocs/joomla/ so that you can easily organize your websites. You’ll be able to access any files in the htdocs folder of XAMPP by opening a web browser and typing in http://localhost/. On a remote web server, the directory to which you should save the files will vary greatly depending on the server setup. Some servers will have a folder called public or html and others may not even give you a choice. It’s best to consult your web hosting company if you’re not certain. If you want to access the files, you can do so by typing in your website address in a browser. From this point forward, I’ll be referring to the folder in which your files have been installed as your root folder or root directory. Step Two – Creating The Database Create Database Now that you have the files saved, it’s time to create a database. This might sound intimidating, but it really won’t be too hard. You will need to write down a few items for the next step, though, so keep a pen and paper handy. For those that have phpMyAdmin, if you haven’t already done so, you’ll have to create a password through the XAMPP control panel. Write down both the username and the password and then log into phpMyAdmin. You should see a screen like the one above. The only part you’ll need to worry about is the part circled in red, “Create a new database”. You can name your database whatever you’d like, but for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to just name this one “joomla”. Collation won’t concern you too much, but select “utf8_bin” and then hit the Create button. Write down the name of your database and that’s it, we’re ready to move on to the next step. Many web hosting companies will also use phpMyAdmin, so the process will be much the same. If they don’t have phpMyAdmin, you’ll have to consult their documentation as to how to create a new database. The most important parts of this step are to have created a new database and to have written down the username and password for accessing the database and the database name. If you’re on a remote host, you’ll also have to record the host name, which you can get from your hosting provider. How to install Joomla with Fantastico In order to install Joomla with Fantastico, please log into your cPanel and click on the blue smiley icon () at the bottom of the page. Please, select ‘Joomla’ from the menu list on the left-hand side and click on New Installation. You will be presented with a form that asks for all necessary information about your future Joomla website. Form explanation: * Install in Directory – this determines the address where your Joomla installation will be accessible at. If you want to use Joomla for your home page, just leave this field blank. * Admin access data – the username and password for accessing the administration panel of your Joomla installation. * Base Configuration Admin e-mail – your e-mail address * Admin full name – your full name * Site Name – the name of your website that will be displayed on the front page Once you have filled in the form, please proceed by clicking on the “Install Joomla” button. You will be asked to confirm the installation on the next page. Finally, you get a page that informs you of a successful installation. You should bookmark the address of the administrator panel (yourdomain.com/administrator), and note your login credentials. Well done! You are now ready to log in and start building your website! If you should experience problems with the installation of your Joomla website, do not hesitate to contact your SiteGround support team. With your SiteGround Hosting account you get Free and Professional Joomla Installation, and within minutes you will have a fully functional and running Joomla website. Installing Joomla! On Your Local Macintosh Using MAMP Written by JoeJoomla Page 1 of 3 ImageThis is Part 3 of Web Development On Your Macintosh Computer Using Facial Hair Removal For Women MAMP and Joomla! CMS. Now that you have MAMP installed on your Macintosh computer (if not, see part 2 of this tutorial) you can put as many installations of Joomla! on your computer for development as disk space permits. Developing and testing Joomla! on your localmachine before making changes to your live server site can save all kinds of headaches, not to mention unwanted disruptions to your site in the case that something doesn’t go the way you intended it. OK, lets get on with the Joomla! install inside MAMP. Do not forget that MAMP is an application. It has to be running in order for anything to work. So launch the MAMP application. When MAMP is running you will get a web page come up titled ‘Welcome to MAMP’ with a URL of http://localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English On my computer it launched Safari. The Web page will have some information that you will want to use with the hair loss Joomla! install. Check about halfway down the page for: To connect to the MySQL Server from your own scripts use the following connection parameters: Host: localhost [Port: 8889] User: root Password: root If you see this page with the information above on it you are good to go. Now go and get a full install of Joomla! from Joomla.org [Note: this link may change once more release versions of Joomla! become available. Find the most recent link on the home page of joomla.org] I picked up the zip version. When the package downloaded to my computer it automatically unzipped to a folder called ‘Joomla_1′. You can rename this folder, but not any of the files inside it, to whatever you want. I’m going to leave it ‘Joomla_1′ (without the quotation marks) for this lesson. Now go to your ‘Applications’ folder where your MAMP program is. MAMP should be in a folder in alcoholism treatment your ‘Applications’ folder. Open the MAMP folder up and look for the ‘htdocs’ folder. That’s where you are going to put the ‘Joomla_1′ folder with all it’s sub folders and files. Once it is in there it’s time to go to your web browser. In the URL of your web browser, if you haven’t closed the ‘Welcome to MAMP’ window you will see the URL http://localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English Change that URL or copy it to another browser window or tab to read http://localhost:8888/joomla_1/ and hit the return or enter button. The URL will change to http://localhost:8888/joomla_1/installation/index.php and you will see the Joomla! Installer pre-installation check web page. Most everything on that page, providing that everything is OK, will be a positive reply to the checks. Either a ‘Yes’, or ‘Available’, or ‘Writeable’. In the recommended settings (middle section) I have one red colored ‘OFF’ instead of a green ‘ON’ for ‘Display Errors’. That’s OK, it won’t stop the installation so let’s continue. If there are things that do need to be fixed you’ll have to deal with them before you can continue. In my case we’re good to go. At the top of the page there is the ‘Next>>’ button, click that. Now you are at the license page. There is nothing to set here but you may want to read the license if you have never done so. When you are ready click the ‘Next>>’ at the top right of the page. The Blank Joomla Template Now, one of the points here is to start with a blank joomla template. So, let’s set that up. You will need this file: livesitedesign.zip. In this file are the various files and folders that make up a blank Joomla template: * index.php This file is the most important. It lays out the site and tells the joomla CMS where to put the different components and modules. * templateDetails.xml This files details the author, copyright and what files make up the template (including any images used) * template_thumbnail.png A simple image of your template (via a screen shot). Not critical * css/template_css.css The CSS of the template. The folder location is optional, but you have to specify where it is. Note that the file name is only important in that its referenced in index.php. You could call it what you like. * images/ Any images that go with the template. Again for organization reasons, most designers put this in an images folder. Our will start out empty. To add the template (again, copious tutorials exist) you go to the admin portion of your site and install the template by uploading the zip file. Note you can actually add the files individually (not in a zip) too. You have to put them in yoursite.com/templates. The index.php: joomla doctype So here we are getting to the first significant part of this project. What actually is in an index.php file? The part we are going to talk about is the “doctype”. This bit of code that code goes at the very top of a web page. Here things start getting messy, and to be honest, I only have a vague grip on it myself! If you don’t want to be bothered by all the technical details, just be aware that at the top of our page we have this in our template: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”> <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=”"> Got it? OK, you can skip the next part then… Browser Wars The nitty gritty of doctypes starts getting messy. I especially like this observation from alistapart.com, [information on W3C's site about doctypes is] “written by geeks for geeks. And when I say geeks, I don’t mean ordinary web professionals like you and me. I mean geeks who make the rest of us look like Grandma on the first day She’s Got Mail.”. Anyway, there are several doctypes you can use. Basically, the doctype tells the browser how to interpret the page. Here the words “strict” and “transitional” start getting floated around (float:left and float:right usually). Essentially, ever since it started, different browsers have had different levels of support for CSS. This means for example, that Internet Explorer won’t understand the “min-width” command to set a minimum page width. Shame really, because then you have to use “hacks” in CSS to pst repair duplicate the effect. Strict means the html (or xhtml) will be interpreted exactly as dictated by standards. A transitional doctype means that the page will be allowed a few agreed upon differences to the standards. Now to complicate things, there is something called “quirks” mode. If the doctype is wrong, outdated, or not there, then the browser goes into quirks mode. This is an attempt to be backwards compatible, so Internet Explorer for example, will render the page pretending as if it was IE4. Scary eh? Installing Joomla Themes: Changing your default Joomla template is an easy process. There are two different ways to get the template files on to your site: Option 1: Uploading Your Template: 1. First, download the desired template that you want to use. The themes offered here at freecmstemplates.com are all Zip archives. 2. Extract the files into a temporary folder on your computer somewhere. 3. Using an FTP client to access your Web host, upload the template files (including the containing directory) into the /templates directory. For example, the “Pretty Much Purple” template would belong in templates/prettymuchpurple. Option 2: Importing Your Template: 1. Log in to the administration area of your Joomla site. 2. Hover your mouse over the ‘extensions’ link in the top menu, then click on the first link “Install/Uninstall”. 3. Click on the “browse” button and locate the Zip archive on your computer that contains the template files. 4. Once located, click on “Upload and Install” to upload the archive. Joomla will automatically unzip the files where to the appropriate directory. Selecting Your Theme: After you’ve uploaded/imported your template files, you still need to tell Joomla to use it instead of the currently selected theme. 1. If you’re not still there, log into your Joomla administration area. 2. Hover your mouse over the ‘extensions’ link in the top menu, and click on “Template Manager”. 3. Click on the little radio button next to the template name you wish to use, then click on the “Default” button on the top right of the page. Joomla and Drupal – Which One is Right for You? Version 1 During the last few months, we’ve had a lot of clients who are have been after picking up on the buzz around CMS systems and Drupal and Joomla in particular. With the upcoming releases of Drupal 5.0 and Joomla 1.5, both systems are poised to make a big leap forward. However those launches may not happen for several months and many companies need to make a decision now, balancing the pros-and-cons of both solutions. After talking and developing answers for several clients, we decided to put all we’d written into one document to help other people with this decision. Some disclaimers before we start: This is not an Drupal vs Joomla discussion, but an open acknowledgement that each choice is appropriate for different sites. Sometimes we have to tell clients that neither will work for what they want. This is not a comprehensive list. Please feel free to tell us what we’ve missed or where we are wrong. Add your own thoughts by post a comment. Joomla and Drupal Drupal [-] Joomla [-] Content Management Very sophisticated. It allows unlimited category levels, tagging and categorization. You can also create multiple types of content, each with different features. Weak. There are only three levels of content – Section >> Category >> Content is available. That’s it. No cross-categorization. To get flexibility, use a Content Construction Kit extension. WYSIWYG Editors Probably the most common complaint about Drupal – it has no default editor. TinyMCE comes by default. Template / Themes Very few commercial developers and off-the-shelf choices are very poor. Most designs are custom-made. Perhaps Joomla’s biggest strength. Joomla has a wide selection of free and commercial designs. Community Features By default it offers the ability to expand user profiles easily and Organic Groups allows for powerful community-building. Non-existent by default but there are two powerful community extensions. Community Builder is free. Jomsocial is commercial but a powerful social application. User Permissions A huge strength of Drupal wins hands-down. You can create unlimited user levels and customize them in minute detail. Perhaps Joomla’s achilles heel. Most Joomla aites will only be able to use three user levels (Public, Registered and Special) without installing a cumbersome Access Control Level extension. User Subscriptions The only real option is Ubercart, a shopping cart which allows recurring billing. Multiple options via extensions. CB Subs and are two of many. Shopping Cart See above. The only real option is Ubercart. Its a powerful, fully-featured ecommerce platform but may be overkill for small stores. Joomla has only one major shopping cart: Virtuemart, but it considered buggy and difficult to work with. SEO The out-of-the-box URLs work well and can be improved with one easy addon: Pathauto. The code is generally lightweight and well-optimised. Reasonable out of the box, but lacks the ability to really control URLs or metadata. Various SEO service are needed for those who really care about SEO. Forums A native and very smooth forum, but lacking in the high end features of the best modern forums. The choice is between Agora and Kunena (native to Joomla but short on features) versus RokBrige (a bridge to phpBB3) and JFusion (a bridge to almost any forum software). Multimedia Not by default but several multimedia modules for video and podcasting are available. Yes, the default WYSIWYG editor allows video and there are plenty of podcast and video extensions. Photo Galleries Definitely less options than Joomla. Decent galleries require several modules to be combined. Yes. there’s over a dozen excellent galleries. Event Calendars Not great. There are options but they are far behind those available for Joomla. Yes, multiple native and high-quality calendar extensions. Document Management Would need to be constructed from other modules. DocMan and Rokdownloads are both reliable document managers. Blogs Good default capabilities, although not a natural blog in the manner of WordPress. Some out-of-the-box capability (we use Joomla for our blog here on Alledia). Good native blogging extensions plus a port of WordPress are available. Internationalization Yes, Excellent. Not by default. Joom!Fish allows for sites in multiple languages but isn’t as powerful as the commercial Nooku. Standards Compliance Yes. Excellent out-of-the-box. Not great. The Beez template does provide clean output but most Joomla installations still use a good number of tables. One company has produced a full set of table-less overrides. Multisites Management Yes, out-of-the-box. Weak. There are some multisite options but they’re either unstable or very expensive. Commercial Community Drupal’s commercial talent pool is very high-quality but also very shallow. Most commercial developers work with large-to-medium size business and charge accordingly. Very strong. Perhaps the best in the Open Source CMS world with a wealth of developers, designers and consultants. General Community Good community. Often more non-profit than business driven. Excellent forum support at Drupal.org. The community as a whole has a tendency to argue and fragment but its also highly dynamic with 1000s of companies offering support and services. Ease-of-use Definitely a weakness. Terms are confusing and overly-geeky. The admin interface is text-driven and often overwhelming to beginners. Joomla has a very good graphical interface but still retains quite a few quirks and oddities. Documentation Not too bad. (Click here for documentation and here for an API reference guide Pretty good. The main Joomla wiki has a lot of highly-detailed pages but also some with very little information. Learning Curve Steeper than Joomla. Drupal’s strength is in its flexibility and power, not its ease-of-use. Shallow. One of the easiest CMS systems to learn and customize. Current Situation Clear development path. Currently working on Drupal 7. Joomla 1.5 is the current version with the possibility of two new versions (1.6 and 1.7) due next year. Roadmap is not always clear. Overall Drupal is flexible and developer-friendly. It also benefits from a coherent and stable community led by several large and reputable companies. Joomla 1.6 will focus on improving two crucial areas: Joomla’s inflexible systems for managing users and content. It may become a little more complicated as a result, but it will remain relatively easy to produce a good-looking site with plenty of functionality using Joomla. Mambo vs. Joomla Mambo and Joomla are fully-featured CMS applications, which offer rich feature set, easy customization and are FREE to use. The first release of Joomla was thoroughly based on Mambo and the tools looked quite similar. Mambo is the older of the two – Joomla is actually a fork of Mambo. Somewhere at the end of 2005 Mambo developers chose to separate from the core Mambo team and founded a new CMS application called Joomla! /djuumla/. Since then, both tools started separate evolution. At the beginning there weren’t any major differences between them. Mambo CMS is a great tool that offers excellent options when it comes to content management. There is also a long list of add-on components and modules, which you may use on it and enhance its capabilities (e.g. forum, shopping cart, gallery, etc). [Joomla! CMS] What about Joomla? Well, Joomla has all the benefits described for Mambo and more. In January 2008 there was a major upgrade of Joomla – the Joomla 1.5 version. The new release was based on a brand new platform, quite different from Mambo. Joomla has won many awards since and is one of the fastest growing Open Source platforms. It has large supporting community and contributors from all over the world. So, which one to choose: Mambo or Joomla? At SiteGround* we host thousands of websites based on Mambo or Joomla. Both tools provide great capabilities and are excellent solutions for creating and managing a website. At SiteGround, more customers choose Joomla before Mambo. Developers say Joomla code is clearer and more understandable than Mambo’s. That is because Joomla started at a later period, where newer technologies were available. Joomla vs. WordPress It’s too hard to point a discerning finger directly at either WordPress or Joomla based on the simple fact that each of their applications is entirely subjective. How we determine which CMS to use is fairly simple: we scale up the client’s needs. If a client is looking for an ‘out of the box’, no nonsense CMS to manage simple product or function then we use WordPress, however if the client is a larger enterprise, let’s say a large retail chain for example, we use Joomla to handle the complexity of the database. So there you have it… There’s our side by side comparison of two of our recommended content management systems. End result? No-one wins. Our programmers prefer Joomla, and our designers put their money on WordPress.