Thinking of Joomla as a framework, not a CMS
During the LinuxWorld SF conference, I had a chance to sit down with the two lead developers of Joomla, Johan and Louis, and chat with them about Joomla 1.5 and some ideas that we and other members of the community have for new features in 1.5. During the course of a lunch, Louis talked about having people begin to think of Joomla not as a content management system, but rather as a framework for building Web applications.
Pretty powerful stuff.
When most people think of Joomla, the first thing that comes to mind is content management: the ability to easily post, maintain, and edit content on your web site. However, the content component is just one of many components of Joomla. The only problem for the end-user community is that the great majority of them think of Joomla as content management, with other add-ons wrapped around it. Even the administration system has a special menu just for content, showing just how important it is in the current Joomla 1.0.x series.
When people ask about the three lacking features of Joomla’s content system (versioning, workflow, and access control lists), they are thinking of Joomla just as a content manager, not as a framework. In fact, the core development team’s efforts aren’t currently on adding/fixing these lacking features, but instead laying the new pipes through which future developers will be able to more effectively build upon.
Think of Joomla 1.5 as a “developers” release, and 1.6 to be targeted on fixing more end user issues.
We’re actually in the process of rolling out a sub-site for a client that will not use the content component at all, and we can see how quickly we can get a customer’s site up and running with a Joomla install framework. I believe the more this idea is spread throughout our developer community, the less people will expect the core to support more end-user content management, and instead want the core team to better empower third party developers like PICnet to be able to more effectively build the next generation of components, like the content component.
August 22nd, 2006 at 12:33 am
Hmm, too bad most people want a CMS. Don’t get me wrong - I’m impressed with what I’ve seen of the 1.5 API and I appreciate the challenges of refactoring an existing system. The new media management facilities are great and it looks like templates are finally being implemented. I’m just worried about the 1.5 “hump” - potential users choosing other systems while developers, such as myself, migrate their code.
tcp
August 22nd, 2006 at 11:03 am
I agree. While I find your efforts valiant and certainly visionary, part of Joomla’s appeal to newcomers is its ease of use and completeness.
Improving the ACL would bring Joomla in line with other CMS systems.
Let the foundation (to non-developers) be strong, so that you get broad adoption. Then let developers go wild and build on your framework.
I’ve seen several clients, both NPO and biz complain about the limitations of ACL. While this could be an opportunity for developers, it feels a bit like a cheap shot to say, ‘you need to spend more to get that functionality’.
I’m having the same debates with the tikiwiki community about WYSIWYG. Most SAAS wikis out there offer wysiwyg as a default. Users don’t care about the wonders of wiki markup, and don’t want to deal with filtering html to correctly render. So if you are a wiki developer and you do not keep up with the Jones’ on the wysiwyg area with some kind of built in parser, you get passed up for other offerings.
I love Joomla, and want to ‘get it’ on this framework argument, so I hope you post in the forums about this vision so we can discuss/understand better.
Enjoy SF!
August 26th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
Excellent post!
Bravo, Ryan.