I have deployed quite some websites with Joomla. Joomla! is an open source content management system platform for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web application framework.
I wonder what would happen if a similar project would be defined on OpenNTF for which developers could write their own plugins? What a wonderfull world the Domino world would be!
Right now embedding functionality from another application into your Domino project is a tedious job and you may ask yourself if sometimes you really want to know how a function works. In case you want to enable ‘voting’ or embedding a discussion area into your application how lovely would it be to be able to just ‘import’ the functionality and it does exactly what is describes it will do?!
It seems that custom controls for XPages will be such a leap for Domino development. Question is whowill define standards for writing them? At least so they can be easily integrated and co-operate with other controls.
Right now I just keep on dreaming about sites that describe the newest coolest plugins for Joomla….
Kwintessential Notes 
You are right. Joomla is powerful and has many great features.
We choose Joomla when we build a notes.ini reference here:
http://www.lntoolbox.com/en/notesini-reference.html
Or the notes.ini analyzer:
http://www.lntoolbox.com/en/notesinianalyzer.html
But xPages and custom control are similar. But they are to new at the moment and there are a lot of developers out there which didn´t have read about it.
By the way Bastian is currently creating a “Self service Portal” (http://www.lntoolbox.com/en/projects/self-service-portal.html) which he will put on OpenNTFs with some xPage Elements and he showed me the power from the OneUI Framework which is very cool. Every browser and the Lotus Notes client will have exactly the same UI. THAT will speed up development and is a great step into the direction which is similar to Joomla because if defines some core elements :-). I really hope IBM will keep up this direction!
eery. I was just contemplating self-same idea, but regarding Drupal. There really should be some collective DominoCMS using XPages with a healthy plugin ecosystem. The larger issue is the market for such an animal. IBM has already staked out its turf w/WAS and Alfreso. Ultimately, I believe the best we can hope for is a vibrant XPages plugin market, irrespective of a CMS framework to build upon.
writing a plugin for Joomla is not such a big challenge (depending how advanced you would like it to have ofcourse) I am just wondering what would be the easiest way to include / upload / install plugins, just as an nsf file and import the design elements via DXL?
Hello Patrick,
I agree, so I started to build it two weeks ago! When it is finished I will submit it Open NTF. Please if you have ideas or questions contact me.
Great news Martin, I guess there is a lot of interest from developers to start writing snippets of add-on functionality for such a site. Good be a big wave in the Domino open source community =)
hi could you please send me a link of your open NTF
Thanks a lot
kind regards Barbara
Hello,
Speaking about CMS, we spent a lot of time here on various products : Joomla, EazyPublish, IBM IWWCM etc… None of these was good enough for us, most of them forgetting a CMS is for END USERS to contribute, not for technical people (depite whatever they say, all these CMS expose users to a bunch of technical notions that are not easy to deal with).
So we build our own, extended it to work inside Websphere Portal or standalone. We adopted standard technologies like a REST-like API, JSON and Ajax UI Components on the front-end, all playing together nicely. We can now have “true” web designers define HTML templates, have our “back end” Domino developers provide services and expose them, mix a lot of “sources” in a single page etc…
Unfortunately I can not open source this solution (despite we don’t seel it as a product) because we use it on customers projects. Just wanted to let you know your not alone 😉
sounds you have done a good job!
I will say this. As a side-effect of evaluating CMSes for a client about 4 years ago, I stumbled upon Drupal. Drupal has proven to me to be the most comprehensive CMS with the most vibrant open source ecosystem I have ever seen. Joomla/Mambo is impressive and perhaps easier to use, but IMHO Drupal takes the cake in overall bang without a doubt. This was a revalation to me as I had to overcome my visceral avoidance of PHP, but there doesn’t seem to be any managed code/Java/.Net equivalent that even touches Drupal’s functionality. In fact, Whitehouse.gov just switched over to Drupal and it is in use on many massive public internet sites. See my original “revelatory” post: http://www.critical-masses.com/jakeofalltrades/drupal-its-cult-thing
I have heard good stories about Drupal too. I guess it’s in focus to take a closer look on it, thanks
Check out “PDQ Portal” (www.pdqportal.com) this allows plugins and is based on Domino.