Joomla, the open-source-based content management system that competes against WordPress, Drupal and others in the world of blog, website and intranet creation, has today taken a step up in the world of converged media. The opensource community, which says its platform powers 3% of all the websites in the world, has released version 3.0 of its CMS, which automatically optimizes content created on the platform for the mobile web. Joomla says that its mobile implementation is the first to be built on Twitter Bootstrap, the mobile-friendly toolkit developed by Twitter and released on Github in August 2011 that is a collection of base CSS styles for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, alerts and more that are already widely used in the development of websites and apps.
Also among the 15 or so new features in version 3.0 are a PostgreSQL driver, a new user interface for administrators and a new front-end template. Other features have been introduced incrementally since the sites’s last version (2.5, out in January) and include the ability to copy a template, the option to disable the ability to change the Username in Profile and the installation of language packages directly from the extension manager.
The decision to go with Twitter Bootstrap for Joomla’s responsive-design mobile implementation, the company says, was made in part because the framework is already popular with developers. It’s one example where Twitter has for now continued to work harmoniously with the developer community, at a time when relationships have become somewhat more strained when it comes to third parties working with its own APIs to create Twitter clients.
Meanwhile, the inclusion of the PostgreSQL driver, Joomla notes, will mean it it supports the main repositories for databases (the other two already supported are MySQL and SQL Server).
While sites like WordPress are widely cited as the world’s biggest website-creation platforms, Joomla has also been a significant, if slightly less consumer-focused player in this space. Sites for Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald’s and Sony have been built on the platform, along with those of smaller blogs and intranets.
Joomla says that there are more than half a million active contributors to its open source CMS, and that its software has been downloaded more than 30 million times to date. WordPress, Drupal and Joomla have come to dominate the market for CMS-based websites (as opposed to those that are built from the ground up in custom designs): together, they account for some 75% of the top-1 million CMS-based sites worldwide, according to an estimate from BuiltWith.