Packt - Building Websites with Joomla 1.5.Beta1

More than a year has passed since the founding of the Joomla! project. And what an exciting year it has been!

The Joomla! team was organized and has built a solid foundation; it has continued developing Joomla! 1.0.0 to version 1.0.12, and now has the largest developmental leap so far to Joomla! 1.5 in sight. The users of the system have had just as exciting a year. Many have upgraded their site to Joomla! and a lot of new users have discovered Joomla!, but there are still a lot who don't know the system. Joomla! is by far the most used open-source Web Content Management System in the world. The development team believes that there are currently about 5,000,000 installations on public web servers. More than 45,000 registered developers are working on 1,100 projects to extend Joomla!. There are more than 450,000 posts from 50,000 users on the forum at www.joomla.org. It is being used all over the world. The bandwidth ranges from very simple homepages to very complex business applications.

In the course of this book I will show what it is that has made Joomla! so successful. I wrote the first Joomla! book, Joomla! 1.0, in Ausleben, a tiny village in Sachsen Anhalt in Germany. We didn't have DSL there, no public WLAN Hotspots, no UMTS, no international corporations, and no city noises. The book you are reading now was created in Fitou, also a small village, but in France and with WLAN hotspots and ADSL. Being online all of the time is slowly becoming a reality. This does serve to make daily life more hectic, but on the other hand it simplifies and enables you to accomplish things that were terribly laborious before, having to keep duplicate data sets and constantly having to verify the data.

Five years ago, it was normal to store emails on your home or office computer. Today, various service providers are offering almost inexhaustible disc space on the Internet for these purposes. In larger companies, terminal servers are becoming more and more influential. The bandwidth of Internet connections is increasing. Unfortunately there is a big difference between urban and rural locations in Germany when it comes to these services.

This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Don Fountain on 7th April 2007 24800 I-45, Suite #140, , The Woodlands, , 77386