As a member of the editorial team at the Joomla Extension Directory, I see a lot of extensions in the course of a day. Many times these are helpful plugins or modules that make site maintenance a little easier or a little smarter. I love those gems.

But occassionally, an extension comes along that really looks promising and generates a lot of buzz in the Joomlasphere. The recently released social networking application JomSocial is one such extension that has taken the community by storm.

A few moments ago my YooTheme RSS feed refreshed and I was pleasantly surprised to find a new blog post describing some details about their forthcoming extension for which they have been running a clever, teaser-style guerilla-marketing campaign. ZOO, as it is named for the time being, is based on the same concept as the Content Creation Kit (CCK) for Drupal. As in Drupal, the purpose of ZOO is to give Joomla site admins the ability to create new types of content articles with specific features. For example, maybe you would like to add custom fields to a content article. ZOO will allow you to create many different types of content types with unique fields and features.

If you are new to Joomla, you may be asking yourself "Why would I need something other than the default article provided by Joomla?". The fact that there are over 4400 extensions listed on the Joomla extensions directory is the answer to this question. Once people start using Joomla, they begin to add functionality by adding extensions. ZOO aims to provide another way for users to add functionality and features by facilitation the creation of custom content types. The power here is that ZOO is designed to be highly customizable by the end user, and thus will have broad appeal. 

Most of what I have just written is based on CCK for Drupal and a few blog posts by YooTheme. No demo is available as yet, and I am interested to get more details. In particular, will ZOO have a plugin architecture so that other devs can build add-ons? This I think will be critical in determining the adoption rate of ZOO. Of course, licensing and cost is still a major concern. Looks like we have at least a few weeks before we get more info. I can't wait!