Content Management is crowning a new king. His name is Joomla.

Content Management Systems (CMS) to date have shown high price tags and little maturity. Microsoft’s CMS Server was purchased from a third party in 2002 and serviced (badly) in 2005. It is a bear to install, requires IE to run and kills registries when uninstalled. Did I mention it’s $20K to get started?

[Bias Note: I've worked for Ektron]
I do think Ektron’s offerings are superior for those with corporate budgets and customer support requirements.

The open source CMS biggies (WordPress, PHPNuke, Drupal, Mambo and Joomla) are easy to install, don’t touch the registry, go away completely when uninstalled and can be run on free hosting.

I would mention DotNetNuke and Rainbow, but I’ve tried, and I won’t, and that’s that.

Joomlaspan.com recently pointed out Joomla’s rocketing importance. Google Trends (possibly the only thing from Google that is not in “beta”) displays the trend in living color. As Joomlaspan did, let’s compare Joomla to Mambo CMS (Joomla’s the blue line):

 

Joomla is a Mambo fork, the politics of which are less important than the perception those politics have left behind. The split created the impression that the technical power is now with Joomla, that Mambo was great, but abandonded, and the real stuff is happening with Joomla. Whether this was true at first no longer matters: it has become a self-fulfilling perception and is now the truth.

Joomla and Mambo are both superior CMS solutions. For the forseeable future, though, Joomla will get the attention as Mambo falls behind. It will get support, modules, templates… everything you need to create a world-class self-editable web site.

 

If you missed Jesse Liberty at the Boston University Corporate Center in Tyngsboro MA tonight, you still have one more chance to see him.

He’ll be back for one more free class Thursday, May 18, 2006 at 6pm.

The New Hampshire Dot Net Users Group is sponsoring the event.

Jesse has written more technical books than I can count. His current books include:

Programming C# : Building .NET Applications with C#

Programming ASP.NET

Programming Visual Basic 2005

Visual C# 2005: A Developer’s Notebook

Learning C# 2005 : Get Started with C# 2.0 and .NET Programming

Tonight he spoke about forms based security, role based security, personalization and anonymous personalization. He walked through using the ASP.Net Configuration tool to create users and roles and showed how easy it is to create login and forgot password forms.

Next week he’ll cover themes & skins, web parts, custom controls, master pages and navigation controls. Web parts, for example, are like the My Yahoo modules that let you personally design the web content you see (also similar to Dot Net Nuke).

These visits are introduction level. If you’re just getting started, this is the place to be. But senior people will benefit. I’ve been coding C#/ASP.Net since 2001, and I learned a few things from this class.

Don’t miss this opportunity. There’s only one left.