We have been trying to find an open source CMS solutions for www.frostytour.co.uk Edward found ‘Joomla’ available at www.joomla.org . Over the last week we have now implemented Joomla. – content editing is now going to be a lot more easier for us.
Joomla provides the following features:
• User Management – Authentication including LDAP, OpenID, and even Gmail.
• Media Manager
• Language Manager
• Banner Management
• Contact Management
• Polls
• Search
• Web Link Management
• Content Management – Modules
• Syndication and Newsfeed Management
• Menu Manager
• Template Management
• Integrated Help System
• System Features – FTP layer, Debugging, reporting
• Web Services
• Powerful Extensibility – Extensions
Joomla is not as user friendly as Sharepoint, however for a free product its close enough. Joomla is written in PHP and requires MySQL for the back end database.
Joomla has plenty of extensions to cater for most needs however, features such as Blogging and Wiki’s should have been included in the core product.
A good feature of Sharepoint is that each web page can contain place holders where web parts ‘Modules’ can be placed, in Joomla each page ‘article’ is limited to a content editor, code can be added to this to address the installed modules (news feeds, having the ability to drag modules on to a page ‘article’ would make life a lot more easier for none coders (or script kiddies like me).
We have used the following Extensions in our Joomla 1.5 Site:
- Idoblog – provides blogs
- Core Design Magic Tabs plugin – provides tabs in articles
- Iframe Plugin – provides iframes
- Easy Adsense – provides google ads
- News Show GK3 – provides list of latest articles (can display image and different sets of articles)
- RSS Factory – provides collapsible RSS feed
- Simple RSS – Skiable RSS
- Like It Share It – Social bookmarking
- CPG Fetch – provides like to coppermine gallery
Joomla is also installed on some NAS drives, one such vendor is QNAP