My Blog | jaythornton.net

As one of the biggest projects I’ve worked on in some time makes early steps, I find myself revisiting my old friend Joomla.  First, a little history.

Mid year, 2005 I was introduced to Joomla, then Mambo by my good friend Pat.  I was in need of an easier way to build multiple sites with user profiles and managed content among other things.  Rather than go to code school, spend 10 years practicing, then reinvent the wheel Pat suggested I try out Mambo.  The system was fairly simple to set up and use.  The bugs where well documented and the fixes weren’t typically that difficult.

To make things even better, there were thousands of developers world-wide that were active on forums for when you really hit a wall.  I took up my post in the open source world contributing to front-end development and posting fix reports to the forums I came across.  Spring turned to summer, Mambo to Joomla and tonight, almost five years later, I find myself setting up and modifying the latest version of Joomla to build a community.

I won’t bore with the technical details but I will give kudos to the developers for making the transition to Joomla 1.5 relatively intuitive and keeping the overall user experience decent.  To this point it seems that the latest versions of several of my old friends (Community Builder & Fireboard to name a few) are more stable and harder to break than previous versions.  Overall I’m pleased.

Next steps include full integration, custom user profile setup, and social media integration.  I’m also bug-checking a Facebook connect plugin that I think will complete the overnight masterpiece.  So to this point, that’s all I’ve got.  Anyone have any recent experience with these systems?