Google Summer of Code

The 2009 edition of the Google Summer of Code projects has been announced. We appreciate Google's continued support of free software and for funding numerous open source projects, and will apply certainly for this years edition. It will be the fifth edition of this open source event, and when accepted we will have been part equal times...we are really looking forward to welcome another group of contributors with fresh ideas.

Joomla! is an international award-winning open source content management system (CMS) deployed worldwide with more than 8 million downloads in the last 2 years. If you participate with Joomla!, your work will have a positive impact on people all around the world. If you enjoy developing applications and you want to work with experienced developers using emerging technologies, consider to join in to the Google Summer Of Code for Joomla!

Joomla 1.5 Coming of Age

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the release of Joomla 1.5, the first major release of the popular content management system.

In January 2008, the first stable release was downloaded almost 200,000 times. Since then, the total number has exploded to over 8 million downloads. Joomla is seeing the highest rate of adoption ever. 

That same month, the Joomla Extensions Directory contained 2,600 extensions written for Joomla 1.0.x, a small percentage of which worked with Joomla 1.5. Today, that number is approaching 5,000 and most are Joomla 1.5 native. The JED is a a powerful barometer of the commitment of the community to the Joomla Project and platform. 

And that community continues to grow exponentially. The Joomla Discussion Forums contain over 1.5 million posts from almost 250,000 users. The spirit of open source, collaboration, and users helping users has never been stronger.

 

Joomla Translations

In yet another step to lowering the barriers to contributing to the Joomla Project, we are pleased to announce our new Translation and Localization Policy. Our existing Translation Teams worked together with OSM to refine and update to the process to encourage contributors, foster collaboration, and maintain the spirit of the open source community. Jean-Marie Simonet from the Translations Working Group has a blog post detailing the changes in our translation and localization efforts.

Currently supporting over 60 world languages, the Joomla Project is looking forward bringing Joomla to even more users all over the globe. If you want to find out more about translations or find Joomla in your language, visit the Translations section of the Joomla Community Portal.

EContent Award

EContent today published their EContent 100 List of Companies that Matter Most in the Digital Content Industry. You can see us right here under Open Source Matters along with other notable open source friends like Drupal and Wordpress. The EContent 100 winners will be honored at the Buying & Selling eContent Conference next April 5-6 in Scottsdale, AZ.

There are a variety of categories: classification & taxonomy; collaboration; content commerce; content creation, production, & digital publishing; content delivery; content management; content security; fee-based info services; intranets & portals; mobile content; search engines & technologies; and social media.

EContent said, "We are proud of this list and of the companies on it. Members of the EContent 100 List are the companies empowering the content that fuels business today. We hope that our readers find the list as valuable as we did the process of creating it." The Joomla Project is honored to be recognized as a high-calibre business solution.

Joomla Best Overall Open Source CMS Award and Best PHP Open Source CMS

Each year Packt Publishing opens the voting booths for users everywhere to cast votes for the best content management system. There are a number of very qualified contenders in each of the categories including CMS Made Simple, Plone, and Drupal. This year, Joomla took the runner-up prize in the categories of Best Overall Open Source CMS Award and the Best PHP Open Source CMS (tied with CMS Made Simple). This results in a total prize winnings of $3500 to the Joomla Project.