Who’s Using Joomla?

Jason Stevens has a nosy-in on who’s using Joomla and discovers it doesn’t take much snooping to get results. 
Joomla doesn’t keep secrets when it comes to its users. The content management system declares on its website that it’s used by giants like ebay and Ikea.
But now they’ve gone one step further.
Joomlagov.info is a web project with a very ambitious goal – it gives a global and up-to-date representation of the use of Joomla in the government sector.
With more than 3,200 government websites registered, it provides a very comprehensive and interesting discovery interface for exploring the use of Joomla by government organizations across the world.
Naturally, it runs on Joomla and is a strong showcase for the automation, interface, scaling, and performance potential of the platform.
The visitor to Joomlagov.info can enter a text-based search, explore by county or region, and browse a global map that clusters together the number of sites within a given area.
This interface allows you to drill down to more detail, all the way to the level of individual sites. When hovering over a site represented on the map, the user is given a popup that displays a small browser screen capture as well as the option to retrieve more information or visit the site.
Joomlagov.info was initially built on Joomla 1.5 but is now at Joomla 2.5. The tools that give it its primary value are the Google Maps API and the content extension K2.
The data for the website was derived from the Joomla Wiki, and clever scripting was used to generate a screen capture for each target website. The ingest of this data through K2 was managed by a 100k+ line script that processed each piece of content in batches of 185. By minifying and compressing the css and html, as well as caching data to a size of around 60MB, the site manages good performance.
Ultimately, the site not only provides a quick and elegant interface for exploring Joomla distribution on a global scale, its developers hope that it will be a “perfect showcase to convince enterprise and government procurement departments that FOSS Joomla! CMS is a viable alternative to traditional ‘locked-in’ bespoke systems.”