Joomla developers are establishing an accreditation program to certify extensions built for the open source content management system (CMS) platform.
Code quality, security, design, usability and accessibility will be tested in the Jentla Software Certification program, named for the Queensland-based Joomla CMS vendor.
Jentla founder Damian Hickey is working with Joomla founder Andrew Eddie on the certification program, Hickey which hopes will build a "brand of trust over specialty Joomla extensions".
Eddie is designing the tests, and will be the program's first certifier while training others for the task. Jentla has dedicated five developers to administer the process.
"We'd like to develop a certifications marketplace," Hickey told iTnews of the vendor's role in the process. "A community finds it difficult to drive something like that."
Jentla's cornerstone multisite CMS product, which bears the same name, was launched last April and is used by customers including Mission Australia and the Florida State College at Jacksonville.
Hickey names Microsoft's SharePoint as a competitor. Others include products by Oracle and IBM, as well as open source media platform Plone.
"Open source products have really come of age," he said. "We launched the Jentla Software Certification program to ... create the level of quality assurance our larger customers expect from their web CMS."
Jentla plans to launch online, self-service code quality and security tests in September.
The remaining tests will be conducted manually by a specialist team from October. It is expected certification will cost in the order of $1,000.
