The Joomla! Project and Community is excited to announce the release of the Joomla Framework! The Joomla Framework is a major step forward in the evolution of the Joomla! Project. Taking advantage of years of experience in creating the Joomla! CMS and later the Joomla! Platform, the development team has extracted and refactored many of the essential functions necessary to create, manage and deploy a modern PHP web application and compiled them into a library of modular packages that can be easily mixed and matched with other PHP frameworks and packages using Composer for dependency management.

This step enables two major areas of growth for the Joomla! project:

First, it makes several packages, inspired by the demanding needs of the Joomla! CMS, available to the larger PHP developer community, paving the way to build new web applications and services. These packages are distributed via Packagist.org for use with Composer and can be combined with packages from other best-of-breed PHP frameworks such as Symfony, Zend, and Laravel. Web Applications built on a server with the Joomla! Framework will have the advantage of creating, managing and authenticating user accounts; retrieving, managing and displaying content retrieved from one or more databases; and taking advantage of many social media integration features. For example, the social media packages for Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter are well executed. They have a common API that interacts with each of the services, and offers good coverage of each service’s program interface.

Second, it allows a future version of the Joomla! CMS to be built upon this Framework and thereby benefit from the broader base of PHP developers that adopt and can contribute back to the Framework, as well as the dependency management features of Composer. The Framework will bring new rapid development tools to CMS extension developers that will allow them to create and maintain more sustainable and robust extensions.

Together these areas of growth combine to increase the development velocity of the Joomla! project and facilitates project collaboration and growth for the Open Source community as a whole.

What does this mean for the typical user of the Joomla! CMS for their website? Not much at this moment as the Framework is a toolkit for software designers and developers. Downloading the Framework will do nothing to enhance your current Joomla! website. It is, however, a great promise of things to come for future versions of the Joomla! CMS.

A new era of rapid web application development is ahead and the many lightweight, modular and decoupled packages within the Joomla Framework positions the Joomla! Project to be an even more prominent leader in the larger community of Open Source PHP solution developers.

For more information about the Joomla! Framework, please visit framework.joomla.org.