Compass Designs .net

You may have visited one of the other popular blogs about Joomla at alledia.com. It's written by a fellow Brit living in the US, Steve Burge (he is going to be a fellow instructor at the upcoming Joomla University in Chicago). He recently wrote a post phpBB3 Integration Can Be The Joomla 1.5 Killer App. As we often seem to do, he scooped me on a post I had started to write about the exact same topic, thinking about what Joomla 1.5's Killer "must have" application might be.

I think I might offer some different answers than his thoughts about forums though.

Joomla 1.0's Killer App

To consider this, we can check out the Joomla extensions site and some of the ranking used:

Bearing in mind our working definition of Killer App: "a killer app is an application so compelling that someone will buy the hardware or software components necessary to run it".

Looking through this list, and adding my own experiences, I'd say that the Killer App of Joomla 1.0 might have been any of:

• VirtueMart (a shopping cart)
• Community Builder (a user/community/networking app)
• Fireboard (a forum)
• Docman
• Mosets

Joomla 1.5's Killer App

So as we dust off our crystal ball, what lies ahead for Joomla? There are 1.5 versions of all the 5 extensions listed above. They either have beta versions available for use, or soon will have. The new version of Virtuemart looks especially interesting.

But recently, I have come across another really interesting extension. I found it so intriguing that I am using it on compassdesigns.net for my downloads. It's JoomSuite Content.

I recall a presentation I attended a couple of years ago where the designers of the Porsche Brazil site (it uses Joomla) described how they had to create a custom component to create content. They wanted to lock in content editors into a very specific format.

JoomSuite Content seems quite revolutionary. It allows you to define fields and formats of a content item. You can use it to create specific content articles in a rigid format (like Porsche), or a download manager (like I did), or a directory like Mosets, or a blog like MyBlog. The opportunities seem endless.

Its still in beta, and has some bugs, but I think that if the developer can release a robust and reliable well documented extension that does all these, it must just be Joomla 1.5's killer app.

I am not sure that a forum will be the Killer App of Joomla 1.5, what do you think?