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I just found out from Darren Peterson about the first meetup of Joomla users in Austin. I’ve been hearing about Joomla quite a bit recently — mostly as an alternative to Drupal. I decided to contact Darren and get the details on the meeting as well as a status on Joomla. |
Lynn Bender: Have you been using Joomla long?
Darren Peterson: Not long at all. I stumbled on Joomla about three years ago when a client asked me to customize his Mambo site. I wasn’t familiar with what Mambo was, so I started researching it and found that Joomla had essentially taken its place in the open source CMS world.
Bender: For a local person building a Drupal-based site, there seem to be a lot of local developers with experience in Drupal. What about Joomla?
Peterson: Austin has a great base of talented Joomla developers. There are more Joomla users than there are developers and I’ve found that most Joomla developers are also Drupal savvy. Over the past few years, I’ve attended several Joomla conferences in different cities around the US and have met hundreds of developers and I’d have to say that Austin and Central Texas have some of the best.
Bender:What are some of the local austin websites that are currently using Joomla? What about nationally-known high profile sites?
Peterson: There are so many, its hard to distringuish a Joomla site from other types of sites. You can’t tell just by looking because it is possible to customize every aspect of the framework. Three years ago I developed Twin Liquors (www.twinliquors.com) on Joomla, as well as many other local business sites. On a national level Joomla.org has listed that the United Nations (http://www.unric.org) , MTV Networks Quizilla (www.quizilla.com) , L.A. Weekly (www.laweekly.com) , Harvard University (gsas.harvard.edu) sites have all been developed on Joomla.
Bender:Can you tell me a bit about the licensing model? How does it stack up against other CMS software — like Plone or Drupal?
Peterson: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone are free, open, and available to anyone under the GPL license. I am not has familiar with Plone’s licensing, but Joomla and Drupal both permit users to customize, and contribute code as well as resell the software as long as you allow the purchaser to to modify and redistribute it as well.
Bender:I’ve heard that, unlike with Drupal, most of the modules are are not free. What’s the scoop on this?
Peterson: Some of the modules have commercial licenses attached to them. Some users don’t like this, but I think it’s a great thing. You get a better product, and better support when you pay for an extension. There are many developers who will never charge for their work, and I applaud them, but there are many extensions Joomla would never have if it weren’t for the development teams working hard day and night.
Bender:SEO functionality seems to be lagging behind Drupal. Are there any solutions in the works?
Peterson: The latest version of Joomla has many great SEO features. From SEF urls, individual article meta tags and titles, to turbo charged SEO extensions, the Joomla team has delivered a CMS that drives traffic.
Bender:For someone implementing a new CMS system or collaborative website, what do you consider the main advantages to Joomla?
Peterson: Ease of use, the Joomla community, the customization options, and oh yeah, the local Joomla Austin user’s group (www.joomlaaustin.org) who has their first meeting this Wednesday (http://webdesign.meetup.com/528/) .
