The State of Joomla! 2012

Facilitated by Ryan Ozimek, PICnet

Description

Ryan will offer an overview of how Joomla! has ecolved to become not just a content management system, but also an excellent web application environment, as well as where it is headed in 2013.

Background of Joomla

Joomla is a classically MVC-based framework with a robust worldwide developer community.

In 2011, the Joomla Project divided into two branches: The Joomla CMS, and a Joomla platform for independent app development a la Ruby on Rails. The Joomla CMS in positioned as the middle child between Wordress and Drupal.

Latest updates in version 3.0

The most recent stable version of the Joomla CMS is 3.0, which features extensive updates:

• The administrator user interface is now mobile-compatible, incorporating Bootstrap. In addition to screen size responsiveness, various controls have been reworked to be better accessible on touch devices (e.g. drop downs are now buttons). The vertical height of the admin interface has been compressed, to make the most of small screens.

• Joomla 3.0 will run natively on PostgreSQL, SQL Azure, MS SQL, and Oracle, in addition to the standard MySQL.

• Menu items can now be rearranged with drag-and-drop. Overall, more AJAX is being used to create a user-friendly admin environment. The familiar green ordering arrows are gone.

• The Search component has been updated with auto completion and stemming.

• In general, templates and component that run on Version 2.5 will be compatible with Version 3.0.
• Although the changes in Version 3.0 are substantial, it will be available by upgrading, rather than by migrating. Experienced Joomla developers will find the jump to 3.0 will be much more seamless than some previous updates (e.g. moving from 1.5 to 1.6).

• Administrator templates can be overridden.

• ACL has been reworked to be more intuitive to users.

• Articles can have thumbnails.