Joomla

Reader Input: Picking A CMS – Part 2

Reader Input: Picking A CMS – Part 2

In The Series Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 On the quest for the perfect CMS (Picking a CMS Part 1), I’ve decided to switch focus a little bit. New Standards As you guys can see, I’ve had way too much on my hands to do a thorough job on the quest for the perfect Content Management System. But then something came to mind. Aren’t we all busy?

Content Management Systems

What is a Content Management System? Here’s a little background. Lots of websites have dynamic content. Meaning, the content is located in a database, usually MySQL, and they are simply dumped into a web template when the page is viewed. That way, if you decide to change the structure or template of your website, the content need not be changed. You wouldn’t really have to mess with anything. Since you have one main template, a change in the template is propagated throughout all the pages because all the pages are created dynamically and use the same template.

phpBB vs. SMF

A blog entry at Ask MetaFilter stirs up an interesting comparison, one which I should have covered a long time ago since it directly affects the way I work.

I’m not trying to stir up a Windows vs. Unix type debate but am interested in your thoughts and experiences, either as an administrator or user.

Personally, I feel that both of these are very powerful forum packages, but let me just mention that vBulletin is and always will be the best and preferred forum software. However, we’re doing the whole free thing, so let’s not even go into the costs of vBulletin. Let’s focus on the two free packages, phpBB and Simple Machines SMF. I have

I have been doing a lot of advanced work on a phpBB forum for over a year now, but I recently stumbled upon SMF. I was setting up a new website in the Joomla CMS for which I needed to have a forum integrated. It was easy enough to integrate the template so that it looks seamless, but I was also looking for a way to integrate the user database of both phpBB and Joomla. At the time their were no components around to do so, but there was a component to integrate SMF with Joomla, therefore I decided to give SMF a try. These are my observations after using both and doing a little bit of research:

Hebrew Joomla Success Story

Asaf Sabag, a Hebrew webmaster finds success with Joomla. Joomla! roadmap is what convinced me to stick with Joomla!, the next version of Joomla!, due to release very soon will have an improved RTL support and more important 100% UTF-8 compatible, and as you know these are great news for us Hebrew, right to left users. I just love hearing these stories of people who have been struggling with other nukes and CMS’s and finally found Joomla/Mambo.

Joomla Book In The Works

In February of 2006, we should expect the release of a new Joomla Book entitled Building Websites with Joomla!. I’m curious to see how much they pack into this one. There is another book by the same author, Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial, which left much to be desired for me. If you’re looking for a quick, light, step by step procedure manual then I guess this will be enough for you.

Bad First Impression for Joomla

A new Joomla user over at Soho Cascade seems to be having a bad first impression of the Joomla CMS. Basically, he’s been having some problems with the templates: I sent an email to this company wondering what the problem might be and asking for a refund of my $50 subscription if the template required a lot of configuration, which I can’t do yet. In return I got a rude little email detailing the points of their terms and conditions.

Nail in The Coffin – Mamboserver.com Hacked

In what can only be described as very embarrassing Mamboserver has been hacked. The open source content management system that lost it’s entire development team and the vast majority of the community not so long ago has today had it’s web site defaced. read more. I really think this is it for Mambo. But my one problem is that people seemed to be getting the wrong idea.

Joomla! 1.0.4 Security Release Out

Joomla! 1.0.4 [ Sundial ] is out today. It covers a number of security issues: Critical Level Threats Potentional XSS injection through GET and other variables - Affects all previous versions of Joomla! and Mambo 4.5.2.3 Hardened SEF against XSS injection - Affects all previous versions of Joomla! and Mambo 4.5.2.3 Low Level Threats Potential SQL injection in Polls modules through the Itemid variable - Affects all previous versions of Joomla!

Q&A With Joomla Development Leader

LinuxWorld Q&A with Lead Developer of Joomla!, Andrew Eddie In September, core developers of Mambo, the popular open source content management system, announced a fork of the project, called Joomla!, with virtually all active participants following the fork. This is an interesting article. If any of you were wondering about the Mambo-Joomla split, here you go. One thing I forgot to mention is that Mambo is still in existence.

From Mambo – Joomla! 1.0

Ok, we’ve all heard of Mambo CMS (Content Management System). It’s a PHP package which many use to set up and manage websites. I’ve been using Mambo on a couple of my sites in the past and frequently on sites done for customers who wish to perform their own updates to their sites but have little web development skills. Although Mambo has a bit of a learning curve, once you do the workings down, anyone can update the site in a nice WYSIWYG editor straight from the website itself.