Yesterday I attended a workshop on Joomla. Joomla is a Content Management System (CMS) for websites. It was nice because the person who held it was someone from the core team of joomla: Johan Janssens, a lead developer. It started out as an “evangelist” session where they introduced joomla and showed its numerous awards and different functionalities that made it better than the rest. I must say they did do a good job of converting me. :)

I have had some experience with Mambo before.  Mambo was the predecessor of Joomla, an interesting story in itself where the community wanted to take the project in a different direction versus where the company thus came Joomla.  I found Mambo too clunky and not very extensible in terms of how you can design the templates.  I remember that I had a hard time making their standard 3 column layout into 2.  So I abandoned trying to learn mambo altogether.

In the afternoon, Johan showed us the new version (Joomla 1.5 beta) and explained the philosophy and framework.  This looks promising because they have adapted a lot of web standards and accessibility into the package.  Of course this is just one of the new features.  There was a lot of work behind it.. new features, new templates even a new look for the adminstrator pages.

Posted in Personal, Tech, Web Design |

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