My newest title, the Joomla! Bible, is out today -- here's the press release:
Global publisher John Wiley & Sons has released the newest title in their Bible series -- The Joomla! Bible. The title, authored by Ric Shreves, provides the most comprehensive documentation yet released for the award-winning Joomla! Content Management System (CMS).
The Joomla! CMS is one of the world’s most successful Open Source projects with more than 200,000 community members and users. Shreves adds, “Joomla is an advanced content management system and a complicated software package. While the system is easy enough for most people to attain a basic proficiency without extensive coaching, it is hard to reach the full potential of the system without additional guidance.”
Security is not one single thing; it is a process, a set of steps that need to be taken in order to achieve a result. The process begins with your server settings and the Joomla! core files. If you fail to make this base level of the system secure, than additional steps are at the very least of limited effectiveness, at the very worst -- they are pointless. Note as well, the first step towards assuring your site’s integrity is also one of the easiest: Only install the most recent version of the Joomla! core file packages found at the official download site, JoomlaCode.org.
If you have ever worked with the front end content management workflow in the default Joomla! system, you will appreciate that, straight out of the box, it is not as user-friendly as you might like it to be (indeed, some might say that is a generous description!). Nonetheless, it remains a powerful tool when properly configured -- and when the team using it is adequately trained.
The struggle for optimal site performance is a battle all web designers & site owners face from time to time. You see a lot of sites on the web that load slowly or perform poorly. While some sites have hosting issues, most are simply built without performance in mind. Joomla!, in and of itself, is neutral in terms of site performance; it's how you configure it and what you do with it that creates -- or prevents -- solid site performance.
Judging the market share of open source content management systems with numerical accuracy is a difficult proposition due to the lack of direct metrics on adoption rates. As a result, in creating the 2008 report, we focused on a number of indirect indicators and then cross-correlated them to reach our conclusions. One of the (many) indicators we examined was the popularity of the primary project site for each particular system.
