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46 Joomla Questions Answered

29.08.09

Last week I gave a highly successful free webinar on Joomla as part of promoting the second edition of my book on Safari Books Online.

Ably assisted By Steve Burge of Alledia.com, we gave an hour long intro to Joomla, and were also able to answer many questions.

46 of them to be exact, here are the answers!

Q&A Session for Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide with Barrie North Date: August 19, 2009

Q: What do you recommend for e-commerce, selling things or s[...]

Let's say you create a link to a single article in Joomla 1.5 (called an article layout). Beyond the standard items you could configure with Joomla 1.5, like the title, alias, parent, and so forth, there were some limited parameters you could set for the article:

The Joomla! Community Leadership Team (CLT) is currently seeking new members to join us on our team and we want YOU, our fellow community members, to nominate those you feel would be well suited! (yes, you can nominate yourself as well ;) )

If you’ve been around Joomla for a long time then you’re likely already aware of what the CLT is, what we do and how we fit into the project structure.  If that’s the case, feel free to skip to the bottom for the nomination details.  

For those of you who don’t know or who aren’t 100% sure, we’ve listed some details here to help outline the whole picture.

What is the CLT?

There is a large working group within the project called the Community Workgroup (CWG) under which certain sites/areas fall. Those areas are Joomla User Groups (JUGs), the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED), the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD), the Joomla Community Magazine (JCM), the Joomla People Site, the Joomla Community Forums, the Joomla! Community Portal, the Vulnerable Extensions List (VEL) and Joomla.org main site. Hundreds of volunteers make up the teams that manage those areas.  The Community Leadership Team, CLT, is the leadership arm of the project responsible for the Community Workgroup , CWG as a whole.

What does the CLT do?

Our CLT roles in the Community Workgroup includes recruiting new volunteers, working with the teams on daily tasks, adding necessary features to the various directories and sites, helping the teams roll out new sites when ready, as well as the overall responsibility of ensuring a healthy atmosphere for all contributors.  We also communicate on a regular basis with one another, members of our teams, community members and our fellow teams the leadership group - the Production Leadership Team (PLT) and the Open Source Matters board (OSM).  

In addition to our roles within teams, the CLT is also responsible for the organization and upkeep of the various sites in the Joomla.org family. This includes duties such as software updates, security monitoring, feature updates and overall site management.

There are also a number of administrative and communicative responsibilities where we could use some additional help such as blogging, keeping the community updated and involved in our news and decisions, community outreach and evangelism, scheduled and recorded meetings, publishing of meeting minutes and outcomes, managing our People site group, and utilizing other social media areas such as Twitter, facebook and YouTube.

We also want make a larger effort towards internationalization of the sites and communication between various regional and international communities and joomla.org.

Who is the CLT looking for?

So as you can see, the CLT has a lot on its plate and we could really use some new, fresh faces and ideas and experience to help us with these tasks, reach goals and move the Community Workgroup forward.  

We’re looking for people with the following skills and abilities:

In General:

• comfortable working with people of different backgrounds - be they cultural, professional or any other
• Somebody who can work well on their own but also contribute to combined goals as a member of a team
• Demonstrate problem solving abilities
• Ability to handle controversial situations
• Some experience working/volunteering for an open source software project, preferably Joomla, though experience that can be shared from other projects is certainly welcome
• General conduct of a professional and considerate nature on Joomla.org as well as other sites and media channels
• Must have a reasonable and consistent amount of time to focus on your leadership responsibilities each week.
• Must be willing to read and agree to abide by the Joomla Code of Conduct

Some specific skills that would be an asset to the CLT:

• Good administrative skills - Not necessarily due to professional experience, but if you’re an organizer, planner, get-stuff-done kind of person then let us know
• Management skills - whether in business or volunteer roles, if you’ve been a leader in the past, we’d love to know more about you
• International community members with English as a first or second language
• Writing/blogging/communication skills with a general interest in that area.
• An interest in, and aptitude for making use of, social media channels of communication: twitter, facebook, youTube, etc

So if you or someone you know fits any combination of the above criteria and would like to be a part of Joomla’s Community Leadership Team, please send us an email with a name, some information about your nominee and why you think they would be a good fit,  and a preferred email address and/or Skype or GTalk details for contact.

We will be welcoming nominations from today through Friday, June 10, 2011. The current members of the CLT will be reviewing and considering all nominations from which we will select and contact those we feel would be the best fit to join. You can send your email to nominate@community.joomla.org Please be sure to include “CLT Nomination” in your email title.

The Community Leadership Team (CLT) will be hosting a summit on 1 October 2010 through 4 October 2010 in San Jose, California.  This will overlap the Joomla! Day West 2010.  Members of the CLT will be available for questions and feedback during the Joomla! Day event and are also on the presenter's list.

The CLT is tasked with the operation of the Joomla.org sites including the Extensions Directory, Forums, Resources Directory, Community Magazine, Community Portal, J!People and the teams of volunteers that facilitate these sites (known as the Community Working Groups).  One of the primary responsibilities of the CLT is to provide a safe and positive environment for the community.  During this summit, the CLT will meet to discuss ways to help the community and the teams and additionally plan and prepare for the future.  We want community input for topics that should be discussed.  To help facilitate this we have setup a simple form (below) for you to submit your anonymous suggestions for topics to cover.

Addtionally, we are going one step further - a Live streamed "Open for Questions" session will be held on 4 October 2010 from 9am - 10am (GMT-7).  This will be available for free to all community members by simply going to the JoomlaCommunity Livestream channel: http://www.livestream.com/joomlacommunity

We look forward to this exciting event and the feedback and participation of everyone!

Click Here to submit your topic suggestions!

There are lots of email marketing services: iContact, Mailchimp, Aweber etc etc.

But I don't think there has been a scientific test and review of how well they deliver, all of them give their deliverability rates, but how can we compare them?

I need your help to do this very test and compare these services, here's how...

The test is a simple one, gather a test group of volunteers (that's you) and then get a subscription to each service. We'll then send out an identic[...]

For a long time I've wondered why commenting on articles hasn't been a stock feature in Joomla.  For the most part, I think probably 90% of websites today use the function as an essential way to allow publishers to communicate with their audience and gain valuable feedback from them.

Joomla's Extensions directory lists over 30 plugins and components that can afford you commenting ability in J1.5 - that's a ton to suss through, so I thought I'd take a look for you and offer a few recommendations:

First up, its a package called JoomlaComment .  Its a component-module set which has been around for some time and has not been made native to 1.5... so you might want to check out their forums to see how well it performs in Legacy Mode and whether there are any down-sides when using it with other newer components native to 1.5.

Overall, I like this extensions because its themable, has BBcode, offers thumbs up/down on comments and generally has lots of features.  Plus, its free/GPL - worth using if you have time to tinker, change CSS to match your site etc...

As the web becomes more widgetized many people are looking towards externally powered scripts to add functionality to their site.  A new commenting widget that's been getting much love from the blogging world is Disqus.  I like the idea of using an external service to provide comments on a site - Disqus is under market pressure to innovate and constantly upgrade the functionality of their product, which means that you should be getting the best comment system out of them for little effort - no more watching out for upgrades and then worrying about maintenance.  Of course, there's also an issue of scalability to consider - if you ever decide to move away from Joomla as a web platform, Disqus comments should allow you to get up and running on the new site with your comments hassle-free.

Thirdly, we have Azrul's JomComment .  This package has been around for some time and since it was first released I've loved seeing their company grow - to since release another couple of pretty sound little apps to use on your Joomla site. JomComment cleanly integrates natively in J1.5 with smooth AJAXy effects - eg. when someone posts a comment and instant-approval is set to 'on', the comment posting box will fade out and the comment will replace it - fading into the list of comments under an article immediately with no need to reload a page.

Given that JomComment is J1.5-native, you have piece of mind in knowing that it will play fairly nicely with the new Joomla MVC architecture and let you template your comment interface with simple override files - no need to edit the actual component to make your comments aesthetically jive to your site's theme.  However, that freedom comes at a price - JomComment is commercially available for around $30US.

If you're cool with relinquishing control of your data and having a 3rd party company handle/store your site's comments, I highly recommend trying out disqus - though, if you want to keep it all local and are a fan of simple interfaces then my vote's with JomComment.

I've just looked at 1/10 of the options out there - what do you all use?  Any other recommendations?

Disclosure: We're actually using JomComment here on whyjoomla - so you'll be able to test it simply by posting a comment below.

A few months ago I posted about a new Web 2.0 Marketing with Joomla Graduate Course I was going to teach with Jen Kramer McKibben at the Marlboro Graduate School.

Student assignments have included doing keyword research, optimizing their sites for Google, implementing link building campaigns and developing on line advertising plans.

We have 24 students in the class, and I'd thought I take a quick opportunity to show you some of the websites that are being worked on:

D[...]

Since the release of Mootools 1.2, we have found ourselves facing a rather difficult question - what do you do with the 1.5 core?  Unfortunately, the changes that came in Mootools 1.2 were significant enough that backwards compatibility with Mootools 1.1 was a difficult task.  I like to compare it to the difference between Joomla! 1.0 and Joomla! 1.5.  We did a lot of house cleaning and made our framework much smoother and much cleaner.

Such is the case for Mootools 1.1 and Mootools 1.2.  The new Mootools represents a significant step forward.

As a result, Joomla! developers have found themselves in a difficult position. Do you use the outdated version of Mootools, thereby reducing compatibility issues and making life easier for users, or do you use the new version and attempt one of a variety methods of overriding the core framework.

We hope to change all of that in the near future.

As has been previously mentioned, it is our plan to give Joomla! 1.5 an upgrade to Mootools 1.2.  This will allow developers to take advantage of the improvements that this new version offers and to write code that will endure into the future.

We have set a target release date of July 15, 2010 for Joomla! 1.5 with Mootools 1.2.

The Gory Details

I previously released an upgrade plugin for people to test out which replaced the core JHtmlBehavior class. This plugin implemented the JHtmlBehavior::framework method that has been added in trunk. The Mootools upgrade that will be included with Joomla! 1.5 will follow along in this direction.

After the 1.5 update is uploaded, the plugin will be installed the first time an administrator logs into the administrator panel.  They will also be presented with a message asking them if they would like to enable the plugin. Once the plugin is enabled the site will then be using Mootools 1.2.

When the plugin is enabled whenever the framework Mootools library is loaded Mootools 1.2 will be loaded with the compatibility layer.

The hope is that even with the upgrade activated, there will be no negative impact on sites. However, in the event that the upgrade does cause problems, it will be easy for administrators to disable the plugin and restore their site to the previous state.

We're excited about this development and are grateful to the folks at Mootools who have worked with us to provide a compatibility layer that could make this possible.

The code is a work in progress. If you would like to check it out you are free to check it out from http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/branches/mt12.

The Joomla! User Association Norway (Foreningen Joomla! i Norge) and the Joomla! Project are delighted to announce a sponsorship of 10,000 kr (about $1500) for development work toward a system for easily transferring wiki help content to a joomla instance. There a specific interface will make it easy for Translation Teams to provide localised help. This will provide vital support the project's vision of "people around the world using their preferred languages" and "People publishing and collaborating in their communities and around the world."

Rune Rasmussen from the JUA Norway Board said "Norwegian is as important for the Norwegian community as English for the US or the UK community or French for the French speaking community. But since Norway is a country with few people (4 mill.) our challenge is to have enough resources to do the work." This project will improve the efficiency of translating help materials for language communities around the world.

As Ole Ottosen, Translation Coordination Team, put it "This task will need a custom coding effort. The support from Norwegian community now has made it possible to free up some coding hours and provide a solution in the interest of the greater international community." The project should have a solid start with this sponsorship, and we hope other communities will also provide financial support to help Joomla! achieve its internationalisation and localisation goals.

Ryan Ozimek, who chairs the OSM Capital Committee, said "There are four great ways for people to support the project: development (code), community contributions, third party ecosystem creations, and direct financial support.  Financial support to the project is integral to our community's success because that ensures the infrastructure support that can't strategically be upkept without financial support. Your funding goes directly to paying for our robust servers, protection of the community's well built brands and copyrights, and supporting our wonderful JoomlaDay events worldwide." Potential sponsors for this or other projects should contact Ryan.

Open Source Matters (OSM) is pleased to announce the April 2011 call for board member nominees.

OSM is entrusted with providing organizational, legal, and financial support for the Joomla! project. You can find out more about the organization at http://opensourcematters.org.  In November 2010, OSM decided to create guidelines for nominating new board members and published those guidelines here.  One of the decisions made was to hold nominations, if needed, every April and October.

Today marks the start of the April 2011 nomination period and we are looking for your nominations for a new OSM board member. Separately, we are also looking for a person to serve in an important non-board member role as well.

We acknowledge that the greater worldwide Joomla! community can help us a great deal in this election process, and make us aware of potential qualified candidates.

Assistant Treasurer

We are looking for one new board member to fill a critical role on the board:

• Assistant Treasurer: OSM is looking for someone with accounting or booking experience. They will be responsible for helping our current Treasurer ensure that all verify expenditures are explained, prepare budget and maintain financial records.

Please see the OSM nomination guidelines for the criteria that OSM uses in evaluating nominees.

Please click here to nominate someone for the Assistant Treasurer role. You are welcome to nominate yourself.

Marketing Team Lead

OSM is also looking to fill a key non-board member role. This person will not need to be elected to the board.

• Marketing Team Lead: OSM is looking for someone with marketing, P.R. and branding experience. They will be be responsible for leading Joomla’s marketing efforts.

Please click here to nominate someone for the Marketiing Team Lead. You are welcome to nominate yourself.

Nominations for both positions close on April 20, 2011 at 23:59 UTC

This is a report from the Joomla Leadership Summit now underway in San Jose, CA. Members of the Community Leadership Team (CLT), Production Leadership Team (PLT) and the board of Open Source Matters (OSM) are busy discussing the best foot forward in all areas of the project.

The PLT had our summit in the days leading up to the overall Leadership Summit. We'll share shortly the results of that summit, but we wanted to get some direct feedback from the community on an issue that affects many.

We decided to make a small change to the way Joomla versions are numbered. If you have read about the new development cycle, you know we now have a new Joomla version every six months and one long-term-support (LTS) release every 18 months. Versions 1.6 and 1.7 are six-month releases and the next release in January 2012 will be an LTS release. This way, users have a choice. They can get the latest and greatest version by updating with improvements every six months, or they can have a more stable feature set with updates every 18 months.  Maintenance and security releases will be done as necessary for both LTS and STS releases during their support periods.

To try to make this as clear as possible to users, we have decided that the long-term releases will always be labeled as x.5 releases. For example, 3.0 and 3.1 will be regular, short-term six-month releases. The following version would be 3.5, indicating that it is a LTS release. Version 3.5 will be supported for 18 months. In the meantime, we will release 4.0 and 4.1. The LTS replacement for 3.5 will be 4.5, 18 months later.

We would like to present two options to the community to decide how to proceed with this versioning approach. 

Click on the diagram above to view a larger version.

The first option (Option #1) in the diagram is to call the January 2012 release (long-term release) 1.8. The subsequent short -term releases would be 2.0 and 2.1 (e.g. maintenance releases would be 2.0.1 or 2.1.1, etc.) and the following release would be 2.5 (using the x.5 number to identify it as a long-term release). This would be an anomaly in the versioning strategy because it would be the only version to not follow the x.5 numbering, but this version number would naturally follow 1.6 and 1.7.

The second option (Option #2) in the diagram is to call the January 2012 release (long-term release) 2.5. The subsequent short -term releases would be 3.0 and 3.1 (e.g. maintenance releases would be 3.0.1 or 3.1.1, etc.) and the following release would be 3.5 (using the x.5 number to identify it as a long-term release). This would be an anomaly in the versioning strategy because there would be no version numbers between 1.7 and 2.5, but this version number would follow the future versioning strategy (also there would be backwards compatibility with Joomla 1.5).

Vote for the option that makes the best sense here:

http://tinyurl.com/jversion

 

 

 

 

 

/boggle

If you haven't noticed, there has been HUGE change in Google's search results. The weird "google wonder wheel" is the least of it.

Are you ready for the new search landscape?

This is just a short note to say that we've asked the Forum Admins to archive the White Papers forum while the Production Leadership Team works on a replacement in conjunction with the rebooting of developer.joomla.org and the commencement of new development initiatives this year.  The content will be kept for some time as there is good material in there to work off.  More information about a replacement process will be forthcoming as soon as we can make it available to you.

Left to right: Phil Locke, Robert Deutz, Alice Grevet, Jacques Rentzke, Javier Gómez, Marijke Stuivenberg, Andy Tarr, Ryan Ozimek, Dianne Henning. Attending JAB but not in the photo: Paul Orwig

From May 6 - 8 in Kerkrade, The Netherlands, 220 Joomla! community members gathered at the unforgettable JandBeyond conference. Among them were 10 members of the Board of Open Source Matters (OSM). We came as community members to connect, network, and meet again or for the first time many of the people who make the Joomla! Open Source project such an exciting place to be.

The large turnout of OSM members allowed us to share experiences and goals as a group with the attendees, and to talk as a group about impressions and lessons learned from this event. I think everyone will agree that JandBeyond was an invaluable experience in every way!

A high point for all of us was standing together during Ryan's well-attended "State of OSM" session. After he presented achievements from the past year, various members shared OSM goals for 2011.

The goals included increased revenue sources, a new online shop, trademark team streamlining and improvements, upcoming conferences, a Joomla! Supporters club, PR and awareness initiatives, and the simplification and documentation of processes. The presentation was followed by questions from the community about revenue spending and leadership dynamics.

The following is a summary of the question and answer time:

Community: What is the purpose of raising money? What are the plans for that money?

OSM: We want a cushion so that when good ideas come up we will be able to respond in a timely manner. We want to be able to enact good ideas coming out of the community.

Community: Some ideas for the spending of increased revenue:

A Summer of Code funded by Joomla
Getting all of OSM, CLT, and PLT together in one place for the world community to talk about the goals of Joomla
Pay a consulting firm to do an analysis for security and performance
Give a portion of surplus to charity. (OSM: We donated money to SFLC this year)
Do a targeted prize contest with specific requirements with a cash prize to the winner

Community: Would you consider contracting paid development work again?

OSM: We would not do it the way it was done before. If we do consider it again, it would be only for a very specific task.

Community: Congratulations on your structure and leadership but who is going to influence the other parts of the leadership?

OSM: We can use leadership by example. There are processes being put into place that give opportunities to understand, influence and encourage. There will also be a joint summit in July.

Community: There is a perception that OSM can give active guidance.

OSM: It’s not OSM’s role to be the teacher and the others to be students. We can only lead by example. The theme of the weekend is community. The community has to come together and work together.

Community: The community feels excluded.

OSM: The leadership is working on getting better communications and clearer channels.

Community: OSM went through organizational training but what about the other teams? Did they get anything from that? It should be that if you are going to be a part of the leadership then you should have professional development.

OSM: OSM was fortunate to be offered a training opportunity. Gunner will be working with leadership skills at the summits.

Community: The way the groups are growing is positive because it spreads out the work and reduces the perception of cronyism. It would be good to see that happening with the CoC.

A common theme that we all came away with was appreciating the chance to interact with so many community members and to listen and be heard.

It was a privilege also to have Louis Landry attend from the Production Leadership Team (PLT). He made himself available to talk at length with many attendees. There was much positive feedback about interaction between the community and the leadership throughout the weekend.

An energizing spirit of innovation, passion, communication and respect characterized this event.

The State of OSM Address - Ryan Ozimek from jandbeyond on Vimeo.

To post a comment on this article please visit the thread on the J!People site: http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1198-Open+Source+Matters+at+JandBeyond.html?groupid=579

Join me next week for the 2nd in the series of free Joomla webcasts from Safari Books Online.

Its on Tuesday, April 6, 2010 1:00 pm EST and I'll be looking at how you can take advantage of the more advanced features of Joomla to make a successful website for your organization or business.

10 attendees will get signed copies of the best selling Joomla book - Joomla - A User's Guide. The last webcast filled up quickly, so make sure you register now!

For the first part of the 2012 budget process, the CLT has come up with the following goals.

Goal #1: Final Rollout of the New Site Templates

Task: Rollout each new site template as they are ready

Task: Open up a channel where people can provide feedback and report any usage issues

Task: Respond to reported issues

Target Date for Completion: As they are ready, between now and February 2012

Resources required: Volunteer time.

Goal #2: Assess the amount of data channels currently in use and try to condense where possible

Task: Have a team of individuals from the CLT perform an analysis of the current community channels and see where some merging of resources and content can be done.

Task: Combine research into a document to share with the CLT and request community feedback as well.

Target Date for completion: February 2012

Resources required: Volunteer time.

Goal #3: Rollout Paid features for JRD/JED Directories.

Task: Implement payment system

Task: Define rules and guidelines, terms and conditions

Task: Testing period before launch

Target Date for completion: January 2012 for task #1 and #3. As soon as requested legal guidance is provided for Task #2

Resources Required: Legal guidance and documentation, which needs to be provided through OSM. This has been requested, currently waiting for that information.

Goal #4: Template Directory (JTD) Launch

Task: Launch a working version of the Template Directory

Task: Recruit a team of editors and put it to work

Resources Required:

 

• Legal guidance and documentation to determine that the Terms of Use for the site are aligned with our ™
• Possible Travel for team members to meet face to face
• Volunteer time is also required.

 

Target Date for completion: February 2012

We'd like to thank all of the volunteers on the various CWG teams who have helped to make the above goals possible for 2012. The Joomla community is lucky to have so many hard working people making these exciting things happen!

We invite the community to provide feedback here in the CWG group of the Joomla People site: http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1371-2012-proposed-clt-goals.html?groupid=398

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