Community Blog

Joomla! - the dynamic portal engine and content management system

• Getting Ready for Mutli-Database Support

  There was some big news this week in Joomla! CMS development with the merging of massive rewriting of queries. Why? And why rewrite? Because this makes it possible to run the Joomla! CMS on many different databases, not just MySQL and MySQLi as in the past. As people who follow these things know, for many years there has been a goal to make Joomla! “database agnostic” which is to say to allow Joomla to run on any database. For a while the Platform has had drivers for Microsoft databases SQLSrv and SQLAzure . There are also pull requests (that is, requests to merge code into the platform)  on Postgresql, Oracle, SQLite and PDO drivers. Great work by Gabriele Pongelli (Postgres), Sudhi Seshachala and the team at Hoodooku (Microsoft databases)  and Omar Ramos (Oracle, SQLite and PDO). If you want to work on a driver for another database (db2 anyone? Drizzle?) you can just fork the platform and go for it!

• Last Steps to Joomla 2.5!

  Version 11.3 of the Platform has just been merged into the CMS and we are down to the last few weeks before 2.5! We plan to release Version 2.5 beta on or before December 20th. To make this schedule, we have until December 12th to propose and test new features. 1. Please test the present state of the CMS with your favorite extensions and report any bug on the Tracker. TEST: The CMS can be downloaded from https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/downloads (Not for production sites!) REPORT ISSUES: Please post on the tracker http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/tracker/?action=TrackerItemBrowse&tracker_id=8103 2. Please test the New Features (and propose some with code attached if you want): TEST: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/tracker/?action=TrackerItemBrowse&tracker_id=8549 Specially look at those with Status "Pending" when testing One does not need to be a geek or PHP guru to test the proposed patches. And your efforts will really help in getting your favorite CMS in good shape for 2.5! As many of you know, version 2.5 is the long-term-support release that ends the 1.6/1.7/2.5 series. As such, the update to 2.5 will be seamless and will be handled exactly the same as the update from 1.6 to 1.7 or 1.7.2 to 1.7.3. It is expected that all extensions should work without changes for version 2.5. However, extension developers should test their programs to make sure. We hope to get some great new features into version 2.5, but we need the community to help with the process. Thanks!

• Mexico CIty Runs Joomla

  Mexico City is, by some counts, the second largest city in the world. Over 18 million people live in the Distrito Federal (Federal District) that forms the city. How has government of Mexico City decided to keep in touch with those millions of citizens? Joomla. http://www.df.gob.mx now runs on Joomla 1.7 (the name D.F. is short for Distrito Federal and is how Mexicans normally refer to the city). In addition to Mexico City, many other Mexican government websites run on Joomla including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Palacio Nacional. These Mexican sites are part of a trend. Joomla has a good claim to be the most popular way that governments build websites. You can find nearly 3000 more examples at http://joomlagov.info.