What should i know about joomla! ?

Question

Hi,

I'll go for interview soon and the recruiter told me to prepare a bit about joomla! I use to develope in PHP5 for several years, and i know about OOP.

I'm not really scared about joomla! but i'm wondering what should i know about it ?

Any feedback for similar interview ? or any ideas on what i should know ?!

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Joomla is a dynamic Portal Engine and a CMS. More here

http://docs.joomla.org/

Answer 2

Joomla is a very famous CMS but you have to know that it's very difficult to build complex data architecture with it, because you have only two levels of deepth : Section and Category to organize your datas ! For any "general" information, have a look at http//www.joomla.org

Answer 3

You should know about Joomla:

• It is extremely popular
• It's getting better (the code)
• It has forked off from Mambo
• It has an incredible amount of extensions rated from excellent to very poor (dangerous)
• The 1.5 series is worlds better than the 1.0 series
• It is a mainstream product which is suited for everything and nothing
• It is more often used because it's convenient then it should be
• There are good cases for using it, but sometimes there are strong reasons not to use it
• I'd rather not use it in the professional context when the aim is more than a standard presentation site
• Don't use extensions that are 'core hacks'

Answer 4

Joomla is a CMS system. There are notable difference between Joomla and some other CMS system.

1) Joomla only 2 level-deep hierarchies 2) It has encapsulated its database so you need not make raw SQL statements 3) Joomla has a modular system for which you can write plugins in. I have see structural code and OOP code for the those plugins. 4) Customising the output of Joomla and how it display its content is quite a challenge

Joomla also have very strict authentication system. And there's a lot of it under the hood.

Answer 5

I read a lot of people writing that Joomla only has two levels of hierarchies. In the core that is true, but there are more and more extensions becoming available that provide mofre levels. Check K2 for example. Joomla 1.5 is now very very much customisable with regard to the content output. Joomla works with a templating system that you can setup so you have no tables at all in your output. This can be realised with Template Overrides.