Multi-lingual content manager for Joomla! - Nooku

Yesterday, Nooku developers Johan Janssens and Mathias Verraes were invited to the first Nooku Demo Day in the Netherlands. One-Company, a Nooku partner, organized the event for their customers and other interested parties. On the menu: Nooku Multilingual, Anahita Social Engine and the Nooku Framework.

Nooku Basics

First up was One-Company's René Kreijveld, who demoed Nooku's basic multilingual features:

• Working with front-end and back-end translations
• Using the side-by-side article editor
• Translating content directly in your component
• Keeping track of all the content in your site, whether from core or 3pd extensions, using the items manager
• Adapting your template design based on the language of the site
• Enabling translations for third party extensions with a couple of clicks

Advanced Nooku use

After that, Johan explained some of the more advanced features:

• SEO,  how to add proper metadata for menu items and articles to create performant clean SEF URL's without id's, ...
• Caching, how Nooku adds extra caching for some of  Joomla's bottlenecks, making your site measurably faster

As someone pointed out, these features alone make Nooku worth installing on monolingual sites as well.

One of the questions we get a lot, is whether Nooku is already stable. In fact, both the 0.5 and 0.6 releases are stable, and so will the 0.7 be. This is a different approach from the classic development cycle, where software isn't stable until v1.0.  The 0.x releases are not feature-complete, but what is in there is production ready and actively maintained.

Over lunch, an interesting discussion took place about different uses and workflows for multilingual sites, which gave the Nooku team some excellent feedback. As many of the attendees were there to figure out how Nooku could help their business, René explained how he charged for deploying Nooku on customers' sites. That in turn brought the topic to the pros and cons of a funded GPL model.

Anahita Social Engine for Joomla

Johan wouldn't be Johan if he didn't have a couple of surprises in store: he demoed Anahita Social Engine, with Rastin Mehr giving some pointers over Skype. Anahita is Rmd Studio's new Joomla application for building your own community sites.

It's not just a Facebook-clone; it's a modular system that you can mold into a Twitter-, MySpace-, Youtube- or Facebook-style site, or into something completely new -- as Rastin calls it: 'Social Anything'. It's built on top of the Nooku Framework, the brand new rapid application development framework that powers the Nooku extension -- we will reveal more information about the Nooku Framework soon.