Joomla developers creating frameworks and super extensions

Written by Jeremy Wilken 27 May2009

Recently there has been a lot of talk or the realase of major extensions for Joomla.  Major extensions are not new to Joomla, but there is something a little bit different about a few of the new extensions that may alter the way some people use Joomla.

Here is a quick list of a few of the new major projects

• Zoo - YooTheme - Released March 19, 2009
• K2 - JoomlaWorks - In Beta, Release very soon
• Morph - Prothemer - In Private Beta
• Nooku/Nooku Framework - Nooku - In Private Beta/Request code access (for early adopters)

Here are some more mature projects that have been major extensions for Joomla

• Community Builder - Joomapolis - v1.2.1 Released May 21, 2009
• Fireboard / Kunena - Fireboard Team / Kunena Team- v1.0.5 RC1 Released September 3, 2008 / v1.0.10 Released May 21, 2009 - Kunena is a fork of Fireboard, and a 1.5 Native version in Beta
• VirtueMart - Soeren Eberhardt - v1.1.3 Released January 22, 2009

I think that these represent some of the most used and most powerful extensions for Joomla.  There are others, but lets focus on these and how some of these new extensions promise to change the Joomla landscape.

Mature Extensions

The mature projects (Community Builder, Fireboard/Kunena, VirtueMart) work within the Joomla framework by extending the its current abilities.  They are quite large projects, and are all highly integrated with Joomla. They took something that existed (Joomla) and layered with with their extension to create something that did not (community, forum, or e-commerce features).

New Extensions - CCK

This new line of extensions comes with a few twists.  First, Zoo and K2 replace what I consider the core feature of Joomla, article editing.  However, they do much much more.  They are content construction kits, meaning they don't limit your content to just articles.  They are designed to be a super extension, which can essentially replace the need for various other extensions (such as a download manager, photo gallery, etc).  They also have or will have extensions for Zoo and K2 to extend these types of features even further.  An example is that Joomlaworks has created a blogging extension to K2 that makes setting up a blog with K2 a breeze.

Nooku Framework

The other two new extensions are really a bit more than just extensions.  Nooku/Nooku Framework is actually two separate things, Nooku Framework is a new PHP5.2 rapid extension framework that can be installed as a plugin while Nooku is a multi-lingual content manager build ontop of the Nooku Framework. The framework allows developers to build new extensions using their the Nooku Framework API instead of the Joomla Framework API theoretically in less time.

Morph

Morph, from Prothemer, is an attempt to revolutionize templates in Joomla.  It acts like an extension, but allows you to have finer control over the layout, particularly if you are less designer savvy.  It calls itself a rapid template development framework, but the full details are still a little bit fuzzy for me to report.  However, the basic concept I see them taking is ways to have little snippets that can be easily added (without coding knowledge) that will customize your template.  Probably a better summation is a template manager on steroids, again when I can I will try to update with more details.

Lots of stuff coming up

So you can see that there are some exciting things cooking up in the Joomla world, but the questions still remain on how these new super extensions will affect the Joomla community.  I always advocate using what makes the most sense for a site, so not every website will benefit from the additional features these can provide.  However, the whole community can benefit from the attention being given to Joomla as well as a new breed of super extensions.  I believe we will be seeing more things like this to come in the future, and that makes it a good time to be using Joomla.