Posted by: Qasim Virjee on Tuesday, 17 February 2009

In somewhat of an ambitious statement last Thursday, Joomla template and extension development firm Yootheme announced that they are almost ready to release 'CCK for Joomla' - an extension they're calling 'Zoo.'

As of now, Zoo seems to offer Joomla developers an easy interface for creating content types other than the standard 'article' type which is the basis of content currently in Joomla.  The concept is exciting - but I wouldn't be so quick as to liken Zoo to CCK; you see the Content Construction Kit for Drupal ('CCK') is a highly advanced extension which provides an infrastructure for complex content types which can interface with each other and be presented in a myriad of ways through dynamic GUI-created-and-controlled views and panels.  Then again, once Zoo is released I expect a hugely positive reaction from the Joomla community and that could speed up development of its feature set; depending on how easily people can extend it.  Yootheme have mentioned that a template engine will be included; it will be interesting to see how this stacks up to the Views/Panel modules for Drupal.

I've blogged before that there are a few different people working on custom content types for Joomla.  Building a CCK for Joomla is an excellent idea and I'm loving the attention its been getting since the introduction of Joomla 1.5, though I really want to see the idea translate into an extension that is built with sustanable scalability in mind.

Ultimately I feel this functionality should be included Joomla core - with extensions being provided by the community offering new types of fields which can be combined to create content types; an approach which exists in the Drupal community.  Over the past few years CCK has become an integral part of most Drupal websites and this has even spurred a donation effort to raise enough money to get it fine tuned enough to be included in an upcoming Drupal core. 

Reading through the commend thread on Yoo's announcement, it looks like they:

• will be releasing Zoo under GPL (nice!)
• have built it in a plugin system to afford scalability (double nice!)
• are keeping Joomla 1.6's ACL advancements in mind (triple nice?)

So I'm super excited to check Zoo out and will be posting a full review as soon as the extension is released (no release date posted yet.) 

Hopefully some of the other chaps working on a CCK for Joomla like bContent can link up with Yoo and come together behind one strong solution for the community @ large.

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Great! posted by Jan on 2009-02-16 Can't wait! It will be amazing! For SURE! Thanks :) Quote

posted by Cory on 2009-02-17 I hope it lives up to all the hype. It sounds very promising. Actually, JXtended has something similar in their Catalog component. Quote

competitors - pros and cons ? posted by rk on 2009-02-18 What an exciting announcement!!! I would really like to see a comparison chart or at least an article, whats the difference to other "competitors". I love joomla in spite of the missing cck and missing advanced acl. I am wating for ages now to get my hands on a real integrated, extendable and advanced itemtype expansion... which serves the frontend and the backend. How will ZOO compare to the upcoming AMBRA.content, the wellknown JS resource, JXtemded catalog, Pages&Items, bContent etc. etc. (BTW, all cool stuff, but each of them has its own traps and specialties) Its very hard to check out all the pros and cons... Maybe you can support the interested customers and convince them – and me ;-) TIA! Quote

ZOO - frontend submission and editing? posted by rk on 2009-02-21 Does it have a frontend submission for new custom items and a frontend editing? TIA! Quote

posted by Michael on 2009-03-19 Zoo may be good but be cautious of spending money on YOOthemes. I have been a member for 3 years of thier template club and last week I upgraded to thier highest level membership as it gave be access to all templates and any other products YOOthemes produced for the next year. Just before ZOO was released they changed thier terms and conditions and now I have to pay extra for the ZOO component. I am pretty unhappy as I paid for one thing but now I have to pay again to receive what I paid for. The membership I paid for was thier best level (platinum) and it is not cheap. Quote

posted by Michael on 2009-03-20 Zoo looks promising but YOOthemes have not behaved ethically. Only a week ago I paid for a platinum membership with them that said i could get all templates and any other product they make for a year for free. The membership was not cheap. Two days ago they changed the terms and conditions of what I purchased to exclude Zoo and put a large purchase price on it. I am very unhappy as I purchased all thier products already. Since when are people allowed to sell one thing and deliver another? Quote

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