I have to be honest and say I was nervous when I pushed the button to announce the fork away from the Mambo project August of 2005.  I really had no idea whether we'd make it through even the first year.  Well, we did and the fourth anniversary of that fateful day is only four months away.  Joomla quickly eclipsed the Mambo project on every metric and eventually even the most hardened of fence-sitters had to concede that the fork had indeed stood it's ground and achieved success in its own right and the Joomla-versus-Mambo days are long past.  So how has Joomla as a brand performed over this time?

Among the varied criticisms of Joomla had been the lack of a directory showing what the most popular CMS in the world can do.  That changed today with the launch of the Joomla Community Showcase.  The directory opens with a listing count of 109.  Given the estimated tens of millions of sites out there, one can only guess at how quickly the directory will grow, possibly exponentially.  This will be a site to watch.  It will grow fast because it will be showing off some of the best web sites in the world and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt why Joomla is so popular.

Toowoomba Regional Council has selected JXtended Labels to support a Joomla based emergency response web site, replacing an existing and cumbersome bespoke Lotus Notes database.  The advantage of the existing system was the ability to show an asset in more than one category.  JXtended Labels makes this possible in Joomla by allowing articles to be tagged with more than one label overcoming the limitation in Joomla that articles can be assigned to only one category.  The conversion to a web based asset register also allows the site to be used without the requirement of the Lotus Notes desktop client, a serious limitation of the current system in terms of dealing effectively in a crisis.  It also consolidates their licensing, training and maintenance requirements even further, providing significant cost benefits.

Stephan Spencer provides an SEO report card on the Combat Blindness Foundation website which is a Joomla 1.0 site.  This is another example of why site owners should be moving to Joomla 1.5 if they can possibly make the investment.  The out-of-the-box SEO support is far superior and would have given this site a better chance.  But apart from that, it's intolerable that one extension developer deliberately used the meta fields for advertising.  That's really crossing the line.

If the extensions are your obstacle, then check out my cheat sheet on converting old Joomla extensions to 1.5.

I participated in a hypothetical panel on where Open Source fits in amongst established proprietary systems.  Scripted before the global economic crisis, the panel had to contend with a scarily realistic set of scenarios.

Reporting on the event can be found at Invest Brisbane and IT Wire.