In the 1980s, Ward Cunningham invented a new method of collaboration called a wiki, which is a Web site where visitors can add, edit, supplement, and remove articles from an encyclopedic store. The most famous example is an online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Users of the Web site have created or contributed to more than 2 million articles currently featured there.

Within the last decade, there has been incredible growth in the wiki phenomenon, especially related to technology. The open source community, in particular, benefits from the wiki Web sites, since many of the programmers of open source applications often lack the time to document their work. A wiki created to feature a particular application (such as the FreeMind mind-mapping tool) allows passionate users to add useful information, tips, and document parts of the program that aren’t self-explanatory.

Joomla is capable of hosting a wiki system through a component known as OpenWiki. OpenWiki is an extension adapted from the open source DokuWiki project (created by Andreas Gohr), which is a PHP application that provides wiki capabilities. OpenWiki is made to be fast and light, so while other wiki applications may include more features (such as the open source MediaWiki that is used for Wikipedia), OpenWiki consumes much fewer resources and provides much more responsiveness.

Podcasting is the new media. A recent Bridge Ratings study indicated that the number of people who downloaded a podcast has risen from 820,000 in 2004 to 4.8 million people in 2005. Projections for audience growth by 2010 predict adoption to reach 45 million users. According to Business Week, from the last six months of 2004 to the first six months of 2005, the number of podcasts published multiplied by 2500 percent.

Podcasting is the audio version of an RSS newsfeed. You may have noticed the RSS or Atom icon on your favorite news site. With the help of an application called an aggregator, a user can subscribe to a newsfeeds, which will automatically download the newest stories directly to the local desktop for later reading. RSS is the popular XML format that holds the subscription information.

A podcast generally uses an RSS file nearly identical to a newsfeed to allow podcast aggregators (or pod- catchers) to subscribe to an audio feed. Audio files are downloaded by the aggregator (often MP3 or AAC format) into a computer or media device. You can use a computer (or more often, an MP3 player or iPod) to listen to the content. The most popular single podcasting site is Apple’s iTunes Web site.

Community Builder (CB) is an open source extension to Joomla that provides extensive broadening of Joomla’s user management features. It is one of the most popular extensions in the Joomla world. The capabilities of CB include the following:

❑       Managed passwords and groups

❑       Avatar image for users

Picture galleries (especially those that display family photo albums) at times seem to be taking over the Web. Many jokes have been made about the huge volume of the transmission of baby pictures will eventually bring the Web to its knees. The desire to share digital pictures and the ability of geographically separated family members to share in the lives of their loved ones makes a compelling case for digital picture galleries.

Whether you want to display a professional photo portfolio or post snapshots of your daughter’s first steps, Joomla can provide the solution. Joomla can host picture galleries through a number of extensions. In fact, galleries are among the most popular types of plug-ins on the Joomla system. At last count, a Google search could locate at least 50 different picture gallery extensions for Joomla, both free and commercial.

The RSGallery2 extension is the most highly rated native gallery extension and is very rich in features. It provides professional gallery and image management, integrated access control with Joomla’s user registration system, and availability in almost two dozen languages.

Joomla includes two editors: TinyMCE and XStandard Lite. The default editor is TinyMCE, and it allows rich text content to be edited using on-screen fonts, styles (bold, italic, and so on), sizes, and so on. In this editor, an article will appear just as it does when it will be published to the site. XStandard Lite also offers WYSIWYG features, but also outputs XHTML- and strict HTML-compliant code for the article (which TinyMCE does not).

If no editor is selected as the default editor, all article editing will occur in plain text. Since Joomla is an HTML system, the plain text actually consists of the raw HTML code.

TinyMCE is an editor written in JavaScript that has been tested to work effectively on a variety of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari), allows for XHTML 1.0 output, supports international language packs, and can even use various themes and plug-ins (including Flash). XStandard Lite, in contrast, is a compiled plug-in, which means that it is only available at present on Windows platforms. Aside from several feature advantages of XStandard, its binary execution gives it a great performance advantage over TinyMCE.