Joomla, one of the world’s most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announces the immediate availability of Joomla 2.5. Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Previous versions of Joomla were compatible exclusively with MySQL databases.
“Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than 1.6 million websites worldwide. It ensures companies and organization, both large and small, will save even more money and time by adopting Joomla,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. “No longer will Joomla developers be tied down to a particular database or have to spend more money and time integrating other software to get Joomla to communicate with their database. This enhances Joomla’s scalability immensely.”
Other key features in Joomla 2.5 includes:
- Automatic notification when a Joomla or extension update is available. When logged into the control panel, site administrators will instantly have access to new notification buttons that allows them to see and act on the latest updates. In addition to updates for the Joomla CMS, a second button offers third party extension notification updates.
- A better natural language search engine to the Joomla core. Complete with auto-completion and stemming (for example if you type “running” in a search field you also see run), it is faster and more versatile than the standard search.
“We literally received thousands of pieces of input at ideas.joomla.org into what functionality should be added to Joomla 2.5, and overwhelmingly enhanced notifications and more elegant search topped the list,” said Mark Dexter of the Joomla Production Leadership Team. “In fact, the automatic notification for core and extension updates received the most votes for a feature that people wanted in 2.5. But we didn’t stop with just those two. Joomla 2.5 is a major overhaul with more than 24 new features that we have highlighted at joom.la/25features.”
Joomla 2.5 adheres to Joomla’s newly-adopted six-month release cycle that began with the previous Joomla CMS release of Joomla 1.7 in July, 2011. Downloading the latest version of Joomla is the best way to ensure organizational and personal security needs are being met since it will have the most recent updates to protect against the latest security threats.
Joomla 2.5 is truly a collaborative community-driven software project developed with the feedback gathered from more than 2.5 million Joomla forum posts, 540,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 8,800 Joomla extensions. To download Joomla 2.5, go to http://www.joomla.org/download.html.
38 Percent Year-Over-Year Download Increase Driven by Large Developer Community Support.
Joomla, one of the world's most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announced that downloads have risen 38 percent from December 2010 to December 2011. To date, Joomla has been downloaded more than 27 million times*, making it one of the most downloaded content management systems in the world.
In addition to download growth, Joomla also experienced double-digit growth in many other areas, including:
- Joomla extensions developed by outside vendors increased by 41 percent annually to 8,475 as of October 31, 201.
- The number of forum users jumped 23 percent annually as of October 31, 2011, meaning more and more people are interacting to help shape Joomla.
"We've seen double and in some cases triple digit growth in Joomla's adoption since 2007," said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, the not-for-profit created to provide organizational, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. "Part of what's driven this massive number of downloads is an explosion of community involvement in the project."
More than 225,000 registered developers participate in the joomlacode.org site where open source developers work together to build extensions and the core codebase. More than 852 commercial development firms and individual developers support the more than 8,000 extensions available for Joomla. About 3,000 individuals have directly contributed to the development of the core codebase via project tools at joomlacode.org.
Joomla recently received recognition for its continued growth when Packt Publishing honored Joomla with its "Top Open Source Content Management System" award. Joomla previously won the same award, the Packt Open Source CMS Award, in 2006 and also won the Packt Best PHP Open Source CMS Award 2007.
Info-Tech Research also recently praised Joomla in October 2011 calling it the "market pillar" of the Web content management market in a report. In the report, Info-Tech confirmed Joomla powers more than 1.5 million websites. These include Citibank, eBay, General Electric and many more.
*Joomla began tracking its CMS downloads in 2007, even though the system was launched in 2005. Furthermore, Joomla's open-source community only tracks English versions of downloads (Joomla is available in at least 64 languages). Considering these two factors alone, the real number of Joomla downloads is presumably much higher than 27 million.
Joomla has won the Packt Publishing award for the top open source CMS.
Now in its sixth year, many consider the Packt Open Source Award as a top honor for an open source project. Joomla won the award based on a combination of public voting and input by a panel of judges consisting of open source luminaries.
Julian Copes of Packt Publishing said:
“Although around since 2005, Joomla really reinvented itself this year with the introduction of Joomla 1.6 and 1.7, the first product releases for the CMS since 2008. Furthermore, Joomla realized dramatic growth this year as evidenced by its number of downloads and documented government sites powered by Joomla. We are proud to honor Joomla with its third Packt Open Source Award since we launched it six years ago.”
Joomla previously won the same award, the Packt Open Source CMS Award, in 2006 and also won the Packt Best PHP Open Source CMS Award 2007. Some of the milestones the open source CMS reached this year that contributed to it winning the Packt award include:
- Joomla surpassed 26 million downloads. Although it launched in 2005, this number is only from 2007 to the present since that is when Joomla began documenting downloads.
- It documented more than 2,900 government sites worldwide powered by Joomla. These include the U.S. Central Command, U.K. Ministry of Defense and many more.
- Info-Tech Research recently confirmed Joomla powers more than 1.5 million websites. These include Citibank, eBay, General Electric and many more.
Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, the not-for-profit created to provide organizational, legal and financial support to the Joomla project, said:
“Joomla’s documented growth over the past year is a bi-product of our broad, diverse community spanning hundreds of thousands of people around the world. The people and open source experts have spoken with this award and we are honored that they have acknowledged what all of these people in our community passionately believe — Joomla is the absolutely best platform to power websites, Intranets and blogs.”
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