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It is important to note the growth of open-source technologies and their increasing availability and effectiveness, particularly in the field of website content management where there are now many excellent, mature and full-featured systems available for managing websites, such as Joomla!, Drupal and TYPO3; each with its own well-supported international development community. The Linux operating system, itself, grew from small, open source community beginnings to become the leading web serving platform throughout the world; and so the availability of advanced, feature rich and stable open source content management systems, with the backing and support of thousands of developers world-wide, therefore makes them an important consideration for any organisation implementing a new website and presents an opportunity to enable these organisations to draw upon the wealth of knowledge that has been accumulated.
Our company has, for over 6 years now, worked extensively and exclusively with the Joomla! content management system (including it’s predecessor ‘Mambo’), providing design, implementation, customisation, training, hosting and ongoing support services for our clients in this field. We, as with thousands of developers world-wide, continue to develop and customise the Joomla! CMS framework, implementing a combination of open source and proprietary applications to support our clients’ business management and marketing needs.
However whilst we investigate, test and implement a wide range of 3rd party Joomla! extensions on a daily basis, we differ slightly from other 3rd party Joomla! developers in that our vision is to develop component or web services for not just one but multiple content management systems, thereby potentially providing for a more flexible, multi-site web services platform and allowing greater scalability and data sharing between websites and web applications; similar to Google’s OpenSocial platform that is the subject of huge international focus. Our goal is therefore to ultimately integrate our proprietary applications into not one but many leading open source CMS systems, thereby facilitating better/more convenient application, data and content re-use across multiple content management system frameworks.
Our company’s web systems philosophy is therefore to make use of a combination of open source systems, such as the Joomla! framework with its thousands of customised extensions, and proprietary systems, some of which we develop in-house. We make use of the open source Joomla! CMS for it’s content presentation framework only, and prefer to pull complex web services out of Joomla! so that they can be better managed and scaled for multi-site implementations. In this way, we feel we are balancing the accessibility and effectiveness of lower-cost open source systems with corporate reality and the need for proprietary software responsibility.
Finally, there are many pros and cons in the open source vs. proprietary software debate, however under both scenarios the fundamental requirement is one of ‘partnership’. Our company has built up extensive knowledge of the Joomla! CMS by participating with the various developers and development communities around the world. We liaise with 3rd party Joomla! developers all over the globe, from the UK to Africa, and from the US and Canada through to Asia and of course Australia and New Zealand; reporting bugs, requesting new features and discussing possible solutions; however always supporting these developers financially for each and every project that we undertake that makes use of their software and, in so doing, ensuring the continued growth of this well established community.
We therefore look forward to partnering with you in the provision of your organisation’s required web services and hope this information on our use of open source technologies, and our development of proprietary software systems, has been useful in enabling you to understand our company's position on the open source vs. proprietary web systems debate.
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