Design Custom content types thanks Google Summer of Code

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Custom content types - thanks Google Summer of Code!

09.05.09

thumb_screen I've been a huge fan of Drupal's Content Creation Kit for a long time - its a module that extends the core content functionality of Drupal, allowing you to create different types of 'content' - made up of a variety of fields such as embedded media (photo/video/etc...), email links, html/web links and so on.  CCK's architecture is scalable and allows for 3rd party developers to add new fields to it as additional modules; so the usefullness of CCK grows exponentially in time.

Actually, for a time I saw this amazing module really setting joomla and drupal apart - as, Joomla felt really limited in its potential to grow beyond a CMS and become let's say, an 'application framework.'  However, I'm excited to report today that this is all about to change...

In mid-2011, the Production Leadership Team (PLT) announced a new release cycle for the Joomla CMS.  Rather than a "feature-based" release, which could take years for a new version to be released, the PLT chose a "time-based" release strategy.  Additionally, a new version numbering system was adopted to provide standardization to the versions.  If you are unfamiliar with this, or simply don't understand it fully, I recommend reading Mark Dexter's article in the Joomla Community Magazine this month.  The PLT's development strategy makes it clear that new versions will be released every 6 months and explains the goals behind this strategy.  The JED supports this strategy, however it has been a learning experience with new versions being released so quickly in comparison to the former release method.

Currently, you will see the version badges on listings for 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 and 2.5.  While this isn't ideal, it has helped developers and users incrementally move to the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version (2.5.4).  This cycle (from 1.5 to 2.5) has given the CLT the opportunity to review, in real-life, how the new cycle affects adoption rates on both Short Term Support (STS) and LTS versions and how best to adapt the JED to these new changes.  

The following outlines the way versions will be handled in the JED:

LTS versions will be listed in the directory for 180 days (6 months) after End of Life (EOL).

STS versions will NOT be listed in the directory, instead a "Series" will included both STS and LTS versions - which means that starting with version 3.0 you will see a badge for "Joomla 3x Series" and developers, if they mark that version as available on their listing, will need to ensure that the extension is compatible with the latest release of the series.

This means....

Version 1.5 - Will be listed in the directory for 6 months after it's EOL.

Version 1.6 - Will be removed (see below for more details)

Version 1.7 - Will be removed (see below for more details)

Version 2.5 - Will be listed in the directory for 6 months after it's EOL.

Joomla 3x Series - Will be listed in the directory for 6 months after the EOL of the LTS version in the series (version 3.5)

What happens with 1.6 and 1.7 badges?

The versions of 1.6 and 1.7, still currently in the directory, will be removed as of April 30, 2012.  There are still a substantial amount of listings that have not marked 2.5 compatibility and the JED would like to give these developers an opportunity to get caught up.  If you have a listing that isn't marked as 2.5 compatible but is marked as 1.6/1.7 compatible, you have until the end of the month to mark 2.5 compatibility

As of April 1, 2012, the JED will only accept listings that are compatible with the latest Joomla STS Version (2.5).  You may still mark the extension as 1.5 compatible, but no 1.5, 1.6, 1.7-only listings will be accepted any longer.

What happens with pending listings that are not 2.5 compatible?

These listing submissions will recieve an error code and won't be published until a 2.5 version is available and marked/uploaded on the listing.  Please remember that if you mark both 1.5 and 2.5 compatible icons, you must attach both versions to the listing and the download link must point to a page that includes both downloads.

To comment and discuss this blog, please visit the JPeople site at http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1473-the-jed-and-version-support.html?groupid=714

Google Goals. Love 'em, use 'em, make business decisions based on them.

If you didn't know what a "Google goal" is, its a feature of Google Analytics. It allows you to set up a specific and discrete goal for something on your website. Examples might be:

Making a purchase
Downloading a white paper
Filling out a contact form
Downloading a file

I'd thought I'd share some help I passed onto students from the Web 2.0 Marketing with Joomla Graduate Course. The classRead More...

Since I first started using Joomla
 years back, I've always felt that with a little knowledge of html and css making a template is quite simple - all you really have needed to know is where you want which blocks to be displayed on your site.

In fact, you've been able to do a lot with Joomla templates, and now with 1.5 can do even more - in making dynamic interfaces for websites which handle data in creative ways.  Without getting to deep into the topic, I know there are a bunch of folks who are attempting to build sites with Joomla that don't really know any html and shy away from 'code.'  For them, some neat tools are coming out like Joomlashack's Template Builder . 

Basically, Joomlashack's created a tool to allow their customers to easily reconfigure color options of their templates by hitting up this website, changing some options in a form and previewing the result, then pasting the output code into their Joomlashack-bought Template Builder-compatible template.

I don't think this tool revolutionizes Joomla theming but its a nice step forward for commercial vendors catering to Joomla sites; though Joomlashack may pitch it as saving time and encouraging creativity, I feel its a service tool that all template sellers should offer their customers. 

As a result of the recent Production Leadership Team (PLT) meeting at the end of July, Joomla's release cycle has been clarified.

Last week Mark wrote the first Production Working Group Leadership status blog.  At last Saturday's meeting, for some strange reason I volunteered to write one this week.

Work continues on 1.6.  As Mark stated last week, the biggest task remaining for the release of 1.6 is ACL.  The other night Louis showed me some mockups of one of the UI widgets and they look quite sharp.  It is pretty exciting to see this much sought after feature finally starting to come together.  Hannes and Andrew have also been working hard to get all of the pieces together.  Once this gets to a workable stage we will be really close to 1.6 going beta!  Keep an eye on the branches in the SVN to get a look at what is happening.

The other area of focus is the Joomla! Labs Project. As most are aware, one of the struggles we've had as a project is figuring out how to open our doors to fresh developers. The Labs Project is one piece of the puzzle that will change the way we do development.  Stay tuned for more details.

Well, those are the highlights - we've come so far with 1.6 yet we still have some distance to travel as we head towards the beta process.  Can't wait!

Years ago the only forum component specifically for Joomla was called Simpleboard.  It installed natively and worked pretty well with Joomla user information and other extensions like Community Builder (which extends user info with profiles etc...)  As its name implied, Simpleboard wasn't too difficult to deal with, until you wanted to custom theme it - back then Joomla developers likely kept bottles of asprin in close reach!

In the past couple of years Simpleboard got rebranded as Joomlaboard and then became Fireboard - which until recently was the best fully-integrated forum solution in Joomla.  Alternative approaches involve bridging your Joomla site to an install of other software - such as phpBB or SMF; which sounds great but often becomes a nightmare as its very difficult to accurately and consistently ensure that users are logged in and out of both software etc...

Well, I just did an install of Agora yesterday - its a new extension that basically ports the simple-but-powerful punBB Open Source forum software into Joomla.  The default style it comes with is hideous, though its code is pretty CSS-friendly; took me a few hours but I'm quite pleased with the look of my resulting forum install.  Of course, it seems reasonable that you should be able to jump over to punBB's resource site and apply mod's and styles to your Agora install - so you may not need to roll your own CSS.

I highly recommend this extension for anyone who needs to install a forum on their site - the full administration is front-end and it has its own user management interface so you'll be able to make ecrtain folks mdoerators of the forums you want to and so on!

If you've checked Agora out - please do drop a line in the comments below to let us all know how you like it; I'm curious to see how it interfaces with other extensions - and to be honest, am not sure if I've seen any modules for it to display forum information (like 'new posts') outside of the forum itself.

Just got back from a great two days at the 2009 Chicago CMS Expo. It was great to see dev's from Drupal and Plone rubbing shoulders with the Joomla regulars.

I had an opportunity to have a quick interview with SDRnews, and gave away some pre-release copies of the Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide (2nd Edition)

Joomlashack's Inspirion Joomla Template is one of the most innovative templates currently on the market. Its built using the 960 grid, a CSS system that gives you a tableless layout and a fast loading site, great for SEO!

Its one of the first commercial professional templates to validate XHTML Strict. This is a high benchmark t[...]

I have recently been working with an Education School - The Upper Valley Educator Institute - to migrate their internal email systems to Google Apps Education Edition.

Their email was stored on a traditional server and everyone was using a different email client (no-one had backups!). Google Apps would provide some clear advantages in efficiency and management.

In an effort to mitigate the recent JED downtime (over the last few days) we've just completed a migration of this site to a new server. The new server has faster hard drives, as well as a higher performance processor (Quad Core).

We realize how important the JED is to the community, and have worked as hard and as fast as we could to identify and take action addressing the causes. In addition to the hardware upgrade, we also discovered what appeared to be a DDOS attack that was also contributing to the issues. Many of the IP's identified and blocked were most likely ordinary computers, their owners unaware they were being used to this end.

In any case, thanks for your patience, and for now we hope things will return back to normal. Special thanks to Ben and Chris from Rochen who have both worked around the clock, staying up late to sort some of these things out.

With the excitment of the release of Joomla 1.6 building, more and more frequent questions are "Should I use Joomla 1.6 when released?" or "Will Joomla 1.6 RC1 ready for production/live sites?" Everyone is going to have their own opinion, but here we have some answers from two best-selling authors that have published books on Joomla 1.5 and have books on Joomla 1.6 in production - Barrie North and Jen Kramer.

Be sure to read a full description of SecureJoomla on in our Joomla Extensions and Components store.

Once in a while a product for Joomla comes along and really makes me sit up and pay attention. One such recent product was a new Joomla security component called SecureLive. A simple module that you can install on your site and immediately secure Joomla more effectively.

Now, I'll admit to not knowing much about the hard core details of server and Joo[...]

A few weeks ago we announced our New 2009 Joomla Training Dates. The first session is in Manchester, NH on May 28th

I am extending the early bird discount to this Friday 8th May. Get $50 off by booking your place now!

Beginner Joomla Training May 28th Manchester, NH

There are a few people whose every word I follow and try to incorporate into my business, and Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.com and Teaching Sells is one of them.

In 2008, Brian launched his Teaching Sells course. A complete guide to setting up and running and online paid membership websites. It was insanely popular, I joined up right when his doors opened, and so did people like Aaron Wall (of SEO Book).

After 2 rounds of students, Brian closed his doors and has been busy im[...]

When we speak at events, or do Joomla training, one of the questions we get asked again and again is:

"What are your favorite Joomla extensions?"

There have been lots of people that have tried to answer this question, and its a hard one. One thing that I think makes it hard is the question isn't "what is the best extension?" That sort of question is really focusing on a particular scenario. The questioner perhaps means something like "what is the best [...]

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Summary of the Community Leadership Team Summit

08.08.11

Community Leadership Team Summit - 28th July and August 1st, 2011

Participants: Peter Martin, Wendy Robinson, Sandra Warren, Paul Orwig (Day 1)

Video participants: Matt Lipscomb, Brad Baker

CLT Team members during our 2011 summit

The following is a summary of the topics discussed in the Community Leadership Team (CLT) Summit:

A. All current websites that are under overview of the CLT:

1. Joomla.org now has about 30 internationalized pages that are used to redirect non-English people to local Joomla community resources. However because of the new Joomla 1.7 banner, the localized link is currently unavailable.

Action item 1: reinsert the link to localized “Joomla Information Pages”.

Action item 2: get the “info pages” translated in more languages.

2. The community.joomla.org site seems to have a less important role then it used to have. Probably because of the success of the Magazine and People sub-websites.

Action item 3: we should communicate that *all* working group members should be able to post blog posts regarding joomla.org related matters.

3. The new ticket support system for the Joomla Extension Directory (JED) is working very well. Other teams might use the system for their own process communication as well. The “premium listings” idea is moving forward, but we’ll have to wait on a new design for the JED site before it can be implemented.

Action item 4: evaluate new design for JED.

Furthermore we’ll have to make a decision about the Joomla version compatibility buttons.

Action item 5: wait for a decision on the new Joomla version numbering, and create buttons for Long Time Support (LTS) versions.

Finally we’ll need input for the “standards” information: what evaluation items for extensions should be included.

Action item 6: ask PLT / 3rd party extension developers for feedback on best practices for extensions.

4. There haven’t been any major changes regarding the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) besides one new featured hosting provider in the hosting provider section. It has been decided to honor Rochen as a featured hosting provider listing (Brad and Wendy were excluded from this discussion).

5. The forum, which is used for technical Joomla support, has been experiencing a great influx of spam the last year. Last May a new forum protection mechanism has been put in place. It decreased the amount of spammers drastically. The downside is that some people with dynamic IP addresses have problems reaching the forum because spammer’s IP addresses get automatically banned for some period. This resulted in three complaints from (non-spamming ;-) people over the last three months.

Action item 7: create a contact form for issues like these, and link from the forum.

The new Joomla versioning system will increase the maintenance of main boards and international subboards because those have to be created. It has been decided to only create boards for Long Time Support (LTS) versions.

Action Item 8: To ensure that we have enough forum coverage to support our users, we need to check in with any inactive moderators to see if their interest is still in being members of the Moderator team

6. The People website lacks some moderation features.

Action item 9: define the needed moderation features and write a Request For Proposals (RFP) to get the features developed.

7. JUGs
* 1st official Joomla book (from Person) was meant to be spread around all JUGs, but this did not work out as planned. There is an idea to try using coupons that people can use to order copies of the books
Sandra + Liam will arrange it for the next books that are released in the series
* be more proactive: identify areas / countries where no JUGs are active (or where they are inactive) and try to reactivate / support people in those areas to organize JUGs.

8. Currently joomla.org does not have a credits page to acknowledge current as well as all previous contributors to the sites and infrastructure areas (software/design/support services donated to the project for use). This is something that can be worked in with the site redesign which is currently in progress *link to people site redesign group.

B. New candidates for CLT:

The current CLT members have selected people from the nominations that were submitted by the community. Invitations have been sent out to these folks and once confirmation has been received from them, we will announce this and welcome them to the CLT publicly.

C. Ways to improve processes to become more proactive

Currently a lot of teams are functioning in a reactive way, in the sense that a lot of actions will be taken when people from the (international) community ask for help. E.g. a community from some country may ask for help regarding organizing a Joomladay. This behavior might result in some countries and areas that are not covered. Action item 10: We should come up with ways to be more proactive. E.g. find uncovered countries and motivate local communities to organize events.

D. Version labeling for JED and Forums

We need to request clarification from the PLT regarding the version numbering as this affects some areas such as the JED compatibility labeling and the categorizing of support forums. (note: discussed by PLT and put forth since for community feedback)

E. Joomla.org and its community are very English orientated.

While English is the common language in the software world, the majority of the world population don't speak English. For Joomla! to be successful in the non Anglo-Saxon world, we must invest more (time) in local foreign language communities. We would like to increase Joomla use as well as recruit more volunteers from the non-Anglo-Saxon world. We realize that there are communication issues and barriers for participation that need to be addressed.

F. Combined Summit Notes Discussed during the CLT meeting Day 2:

During the combined summit the following communication issues have been identified:

1. Language barriers. Sometimes our communication is too difficult (e.g. difficult English words and sentences too long) and too much fragmented over different communication channels. And joomla.org has too much information to translate all to local languages.

2. For some countries the concept of Joomladays is not always clear. Furthermore there’s too little marketing budget for local foreign language communities to promote Joomla.

3. Documentation about processes in local communities is sometimes lacking. Which makes it difficult for people to take over the organisation of local JUGS when current JUG organiser steps down.

4. Official communication from Joomla.org to foreign non-English communities is too sometimes too difficult, and not helpful with solving the actual problem. Official documents (e.g. trademark rules) have often not been translated into foreign non-English languages.

During the combined summit the following participation issues have been identified:

1. Missing overview of all countries/language entities and local communities

2. How to organize responsibilities and autonomy of local communities in relation with Joomla.org?

3. Cultural barriers - in some countries people are not always that outspoken to the international community, only within their own local community.

4. In some cultures/countries the standards of living are not as high as they are in the western world. Which causes that some people have too little time to participate because they need to have multiple jobs to make their living which leaves no time to participate. In that case working as volunteer doesn’t have much incentives / rewards back.

At the combined summit two new problems regarding joomla.org have been found: The International flags in the main menu are confusing visitors, as when they click on a flag they expect to be taken to a page that contains content and/or language packs respective to each flag. This creates an additional problem in that, by looking at those flags, one might assume that certain languages are missing.

Action item 11: find a better way to represent “internationalism” and create an image/button for the joomla.org website.

Another issue that has been brought forward is that the current joomla.org site is missing a search box.

Action item 12: find out why the search box has not been placed on the homepage, and put it there if needed.

During the combined summit we’ve decided to compile a spreadsheet to take inventory of countries, languages, regions, local communities, nature of those communities, and in what countries communities are missing. [action item solved]. Secondly we’ve divided the world in regions: North-America, South-America, Europe, Africa, Asia+Pacific. Each region gets assigned one or two regional community coordinators / contact persons who will help with making the inventory. After we have such an overview they will get in touch with the local communities to find our their needs (e.g marketing, translation), get information and opinions, and help with updating the Joomla Info Pages project (to redirect international people to the local community sites). A further update will be provided to the community when it is time to put this idea into action and request volunteer help.

In Closing...

we would like to say that we enjoyed our time at the summit so much. Not only together as the CLT but with our friends and fellow team members on the Open Source Matters board and the Production Leadership Team. It was a very productive and positive event and we thank everyone that we were able to attend the summit with, as well as the incredible Joomla Community, whom without, we would not have been able to take part.

Comments and Discussion are welcome in this thread at the Joomla! People site.

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