Kane McLean, BRTRC-Strategy and Communications Group

1. Enlisting Joomla!
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Using the Joomla CMS in the Army Hosting Environment
by Kane McLean
Military Open Source Working Group
OSFA | MIL-OSS WG2 | 03 AUG 2010

2. Why Joomla!
● Immensely popular
● Strong, Well Organized Community
● Thoughtful, forward-thinking leadership
● Easy to Deploy, Use and Train Users
● Easily Repeatable = Cost Efficient
Why Not Something Else
● Why Not Drupal?
○ Strong CMS, but very complex
○ Designed for high number of back-end users
○ Not yet in use in the Army
○ Smaller, less active community
● Why Not Wordpress?
○ Great, User-Friendly CMS, but very simple
○ Designed for limited back-end users
○ Conditionally CoN'd in the Army
○ Very active community built around blogging paradigm
● Why Not Movable Type?
○ Strong in high-traffic
○ Poor Documentation
○ Not at use in the Army
○ Very Weak community
● Why Not SharePoint?
○ Wrong Tool for the Job. Collaboration is NOT Publishing
○ Potential of Mixing public information with private collaboration information
○ SP is slow, unwieldy and unfriendly
● Why Not Use PowerPoint?
○ BECAUSE POWERPOINT'S "PUBLISH TO WEB" ISN'T EVEN GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOUR
KID'S KINDERGARTEN CLASS PAGE NOW ADAYS.
○ Need Clarification? Re-Read the above statement.
What is Joomla!
● One of the most popular Content Management Systems in the World.
● Downloaded over 15 million times (now averaging 20,000 per day).
● Approx 2 million sites openly using Joomla.
● Used more often than Drupal (which runs whitehouse.gov) and Movable Type
● Garden industry built around theming -- The Template Club
● Over 200,000 contributors at joomla.org
Project has been around over a decade
OSFA | MIL-OSS WG2 | 03 AUG 2010

3. Considerations for Using Joomla
● DoD Security
○ Approval to Use Joomla
○ Waiver? (CIO-G6 has assumed initial risk for running Joomla, so in some hosting environments
a waiver is all that is needed.)
○ CoN? (Certificate of Networthiness)
● Staffing and Training
○ Do you have Administrators?
○ Do you have Editors?
○ Do you have Content Contributors?
○ Are you prepared to train, support, and trust them.
Enlisting Joomla! in the Army
● Is Joomla Right for the Job?
○ Need for true timely publishing?
○ Need for non-technical administration
○ Need to manage a lot of content
● What Environment
○ Open environment or behind AKO?
○ Completely public (Open-Gov or CAC protected?)
* Milforge - currently working to get Joomla checked into milforge so that all of DoD can use it.
Rolling-Out an Army Joomla! Site
● Getting Started:
○ Right Environment = LAMP
○ Get appropriate approval (CoN, Waiver, etc.)
○ Information Architecture (Organize your site’s content and menus WELL)
● Security
○ Security: FOLLOW THE JOOMLA SEC CHECKLIST (docs.joomla.org/
Category:Security_Checklist).
○ Never Use the Default Database Prefix
○ You will NOT be able to install all the latest patches as they come out
● Templating
○ Templating should be well written and cross-browser comlpiant (yes, IE6 too).
○ Handle All Presentation Layer Items IN THE TEMPLATE. (Use template overrides)
○ Validate you theme (CSS, XHTML, etc.) to verify that you’re 508 compliant.
○ Train admins, authors, etc. on 508 issues they WILL encounter. THEY CAN RUIN 508
compliance.
OSFA | MIL-OSS WG2 | 03 AUG 2010