cmsXperts

After the runner-up award in the “Overall Best Open Source CMS” category as a part of PacktPub’s CMS awards, yesterday the “Joomla! Bug Squad” corrected two minor security flaws in the popular content management system and released the latest version of the platform, 1.5.8, codenamed “Wohnaiki”.

This new major release, which comes about two months after the previous 1.5.7 version, doesn’t add any feature to the platform, but rather corrects some bugs and two XSS (cross-site scripting) security issues in particular:

• Com_content XSS Vulnerability: allows entry of dangerous HTML in article submission with default settings for users with Author access or higher and without filters set up in com_content configuration.
• Com_weblinks XSS Vulnerability: allows raw HTML to be placed in the title and description tags for weblink submissions from both the administrator and site submission forms.

Both these vulnerabilities affect 1.5.x version of the platform, including the previous 1.5.7. Webmasters are recommended to upgrade to the latest version to fix these and other minor bugs that were detected and quickly corrected by the open source developers team.

Other minor updates correct components, modules and some of the default templates that are shipped with the default package: a complete list of the fixes can be read in an official post on Joomla’s official website, while the new full, stable package can be downloaded directly from here.

According to a 50-pages comprehensive report compiled by Rich Shreves at WaterAndStone, the three open source content management systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal are by far the most used publication-oriented CMS on the Web, having opened up a large gap on the rest of the pack that only seems to be getting wider with time.

In the introduction, Shreves illustrates the aim and importance of the document:

Debating the relative popularity of the many open source content management systems
provides an endless source of fodder for blogs and discussion forums. People want to know
who the market leaders are, not just as an academic exercise but often in an effort to help
make informed decisions about product selection.

A strong market share also means having the possibility to rely on a strong community-based support, ease in finding professional that have experience personalizing themes and plugins specifically for that platform, as well as an indirect confirmation on the stability and general validity of the tool itself.

CMS weekly downloads. Licensed via CC-BY-NC

The report, which concentrates exclusively on publication-oriented open source CMS and leaving aside other important commerce-oriented solutions such as the popular and GPL-licensed osCommerce, tries to assess the popularity of such tools by considering a large number of independent factors such as an estimation on the number of weekly downloads, live installations, third party support, books in print, and the “brand strength” measured in terms of elusive factors such as inbound links, search engine visibility and Google search volume.

The interpretation of the large amount of data gathered is certainly interesting, as it is at times contradictive. For instance, while data shows that WordPress is by far the most downloaded CMS by a factor of 4x on its nearest competitor (Joomla!), the latter is also the one for which you can find the largest number of user guides and the largest number of personalized custom layout development services, and the one with the highest Google search volume.

Of course, what this tells us is that we need to carefully evaluate the specific characteristics of each CMS and interpret the data rather than just say that “the one with the best numbers wins”: it also tells us that it’s incredibly hard to find a single, definite metric to assess once and for all which content management systems feature the best market shares.

All things considered, WordPress seems to be the most widely used content management system. The factors that seem to have influenced its popularity the most are mainly the flexibility given by its plugin architecture and the subsequent trend of webmasters to make of this platform their tool of choice for their fully-featured websites, rather than just their blogs. Not to mention the enviable stability and the very active development team, which keeps rolling out new versions (for new platforms as well) at an impressive pace.

In a recent article appeared on ZDNet, Dion Hinchcliffe discussed the nuts and bolts of building an online community, indicating what are thought to be the best tools available to make the task easier for the webmaster.

It would be wrong to think of communities just as a place where to hang out and socialize. With the advent of the so often cited “Web 2.0″, the Web and the behavior of its citizens is evolving at a quick pace, drifting from mere discussion forums to user-centered and user-generated content, news sharing via the various social bookmarking tools, but most importantly, even to get things done.

What I mean by this is that, with the gradual and progressive involvement of users in the creative process rather than its mere fruition, there seems to be an increasing awareness towards the entire Free Software community, some of which eventually end up contributing to it by programming and expanding open source tools for others to use.

This is certainly a great opportunity for webmasters, always “greedy” for traffic, to drive visitors to their sites. In a site featuring a community, the average visitor tends to be more valuable than average, as it is also a potential user who will not only come back to the site, but also produce content for the benefit of other users (and of you, the greedy webmaster, of course).

It then becomes important to know which tools are best versed to build such a community and encourage user-generated content. To little or no surprise, in Hinchcliffe’s article Joomla! took the first prize, closely followed by Drupal and the increasingly popular PHP-Nuke to complete the podium.

The reason for Joomla!’s first place lays within its high flexibility and great plugin architecture that makes it easy for users to contribute to, apart from the more obvious blog posting, comments, polls, chat plugins, etc. Drupal, which curiously enough was originally developed as a forum, takes the second place because of its stability and flexibility as well.

Other prominent CMS and tools in the first positions include Zikula, Sharepoint and Lithium. It’s interesting to note that, while the three top spots are occupied by open source tools (like you would expect whenever you’re talking about online communities), there seem to be many proprietary software solutions which are gaining popularity — see for instance Jive or the same Sharepoint, which is being developed by Microsoft and has been around for quite a while.

Could this be a sign that times are starting to change even for CMS, which currently play a very prominent role in the open source world? We’ll just have to wait and see.

A valuable open source product, Joomla! is a powerful and customizable PHP/MySql general-purpose content management system that is easy to install and can be used to build a wide array of websites.

A Historical Perspective

Born as a fork of the already popular Mambo project in 2005, the earliest version of this package initially maintained much of its ancestor’s characteristics without any significant changes. The reason for the birth of the Joomla! package were mainly of legal nature – Miro International, who owned the trademark to Mambo, founded a non-profit organization with the stated purpose of protecting Miro against lawsuits and resolving the disputes that arose from their sometimes unclear and contradictory license terms, which were partially in contrast with the terms of the GNU documentation license initially used for the project.

As a result, the popular site “Open Source Matters” was created. Following a community discussion on the site which took place several years later, again on the contradictory license terms adopted by Miro, in August 2005 it was decided to give birth to a completely open sourced fork of Mambo, Joomla!, which was named after the Swahili word for “all together” or “as a whole”, consolidating an ‘exotic’ naming tradition that originated from the birth of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

With time and countless user contributions, new features were progressively added to the platform to reach a 1.5 stable version that has much more to offer to webmasters than the original, partially proprietary software from which this excellent CMS originated in the first place.

Joomla! Overview

In order to test the platform “on the fly” and without the need for an installation on your FTP account, users can create a free account on http://demo.joomla.org/ and immediately get a feel for what it is like to use this CMS.

Once logged in successfully, the administrator panel will enable you to add new content to the site, managing your articles as well as your site layout and extensions with just a few clicks; on the right side of the page, a series of messages (“modules” in the Joomla! terminology) allow you to monitor your site with live stats such as most popular content or recently added articles.

As it should be expected from an user-friendly CMS like Joomla!, the article writing interface is complete with a WYSIWYG editor to make the process of writing new content even easier, without the need to edit the HTML code directly. From the same page you can select both sections and categories associated to the article, but also more advanced options that appear on the right side module, such as the possibility to add a PDF and print icon, article ratings, summary and so on, and then of course the buttons to add new images and other media to your posts.

The “Article Manager” section gives you an overview on your content – drafts as well as already published material – also enabling you to change the order in which the posts are being displayed, with the changes immediately reflected on the live site layout.

Analogous “Front Page”, “Section”, “Category”, “User” and “Media” managing interfaces serve a similar role and add even more to the control you can have over your site. The “Media Manager” is particularly interesting in that it simulates an FTP client with live thumbnails of all the icons and images used on the site: uploading a new icon set is therefore made even easier, and becomes just a matter of seconds.

Last but not least, the “Global Configuration” tab lets you set title and meta tags – as well as any other global parameter, such as local time and database settings – directly from a convenient Web interface.

Joomla! Customization: Themes and Plugins

Like it had to be expected, a large number of Joomla! themes and plugins is being created and shared by the user community. On Joomla.org it is in fact easy to download extensions and modules that add even more functionality and flexibility to this software. The official site does not however host themes and alternative layouts, for which users have to rely on third party websites such as joomla24.com.

Here like with other website publishing platforms, the widespread use of this content management system among webmasters allowed the birth of a market of Web design professionals which sell their own high-quality Joomla! layouts and icon themes rather than enabling their free use by the community: however, the circumstances of “open source sentiment” under which the Joomla! project was born have led to a huge number of quality, freely usable layouts to benefit the webmaster community.

Plugins are, on the other hand, rarely being sold by third parties, and on the Joomla official site you can literally download and install thousands of such extensions, which range from flash galleries, shopping carts, complete FTP managers to forums and ad plugins.

Extensions are grouped into six different categories for easy access:

1. Component: mini-application to render the main page body;
2. Module: renders small html blocks on any page;
3. Plugin: changes code behavior dynamically;
4. Language: provides language translation;
5. Tool: external application that helps with creating or managing Joomla! site;
6. Special: extension specific plugin that requires another extension to operate.

Joomla! Pros and Cons

Although an undoubtedly high-quality product, Joomla! has encountered some criticism since its very first stages.

One of the issues that is often being cited and which unfortunately seems to serve as the lowest common denominator for all open source CMS are the security issues, which are typically not solved as quickly as with other publishing tools (say, WordPress [[link to WP review article]]) because of a relatively slow development and release cycle.

Other common issues which are being regularly brought up by publishers are the absence of a granular user access control, which makes it relatively difficult to manage a large staff with different privilege settings – say, editors, publishers and webmasters – at the same time, and the impossibility to fully customize the URL of an article, which would be useful for SEO purposes.

These aspects aside, Joomla! certainly remains an excellent, fully-featured content management system with unique features and a user friendly, easily customizable interface that can meet the needs of a broad range of webmasters and content publishers around the globe, offered completely free of charge, and with a very large community of users that can help you solve any problems you might encounter along the way.