The Joomlashack Blog

There was big news from the Joomla community today which announced a new WordPress.com-style service for Joomla.

This service will be hosted at Joomla.com and will offer free hosting accounts for life.

The goal here is clearly to make it easier for people to get up-and-running with Joomla. It's never been particularly easy for newcomers to find good hosting, install software, configure their domain name, and so on.

WordPress.com has helped more people get started with WordPress - by some estimates more than 50% of WordPress sites are on WordPress.com. Clearly the Joomla team hope that Joomla.com will also be big help to newcomers.

How will Joomla.com work for users? Users will sign up and get several options: A choice of their subdomain such as mywebsite.joomla.com

A choice of at least 2 basic sample data sets: a Basic blog style website and a Company brochure website.

A choice of limited, pre­installed templates.

A choice of some limited, pre­installed extensions such as, for instance, a simple photo/media gallery and a simple comment system. Users won't have access to the database, but they will be able to export their data and media files. There will be automatic updates for all sites on this service. In short, this is very similar to the WordPress.com model, which is far more locked-down than the self-hosted version.

What's the time frame for Joomla.com to launch? The press release only says it "is expected to be launched later this year".

Demo.joomla.org or Joomla.com? As you may know, there has been a free Joomla demo site available at demo.joomla.org. Starting in September, you'll be able to get a demo account for 90 days instead of the normal 30 days. However, it's hard to imagine that Joomla.com will not be a better option, with free hosting available for life.

Who's building Joomla.com? About 12 months ago, Joomla put out an RFP to build Joomla.com. The winner was Siteground.com. (Disclosure: Siteground is a sponsor of this site) Will there be additional commercial services? Yes, that's to be expected. Again, look to WordPress.com for what these commercial services might be. WordPress.com makes money by selling domain names, additional themes, storage space and more.