PICnet Blog

If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a color-picker. Ask my co-workers, ask my girlfriend. I’m just not good with matching colors.

Thankfully, life has been made much better for the color-impaired like myself now that Adobe has released Kuler.

Essentially, Kuler is your online interior decorator, multiplied by 1,620 (the current number of users submitting color sets). Let’s say you’re looking to bring some winter color themes to your Web site, but have no idea what colors to choose. Just go to the Kuler site, search for “winter”, and viola, you’ll find 25 user-submitted color palettes for your winter blues.

Color match, crossed with ease-of-use, crossed with user-generated color palettes equal happy wannabe design gurus.

We’re excited to share with the world the new Non-Profit Soapbox logo!

Lots of hard work from our great designer, Ryan Belisle, and creative juice from yours truly. For those of you right-brained individuals, here’s what the makeup is of this:

• Blue: #2D5798
• Non-Profit Soapbox font: 41pt DIN MEDIUM
• Tagline font: 21pt Frutiger 45 Light

First, I need to point out to the world that I am simply the messenger of all this wonderful news we have about the Salesforce.com - Joomla integration. Our lead developer on this, Kevin Devine, has put long nights and sweat into what is shaping to be a fantastic contribution to the open source community.

Now that all your thank you messages are pointed in the right direction, let me give an update as to what Kevin’s got cooking. Two days ago we were successfully able to push/pull data to/from Joomla and Salesforce. This means that we can now display data from Salesforce directly in Joomla, and then edit that data via forms in Joomla back into Salesforce. It all happens rather quickly, which is a little surprising since the data has to go back and forth between two servers in completely different parts of the US.

Dynamic display of layout features

Today Kevin just hit another major milestone. Now we’re able to bring in form fields from Salesforce following the layout rules prescribed within Salesforce. For instance, say in your Salesforce layout you have a dropdown list for a contact’s suffix. Now without any hassle you can have Joomla directly display that dropdown populated properly from Salesforce.

Pretty darn cool.

(more…)

Someone had to step up and do it, so PICnet is doing it. We’re bringing a fully connected Salesforce.com component to the Joomla community, and should have a beta version ready for download by the middle of January 2007.

The goal here is to build a strong framework that future developers (including ourselves in our Non-Profit Soapbox system) can continue to extend. For instance, our J!Salesforce component will allow Joomla site visitors to input their contact information in Salesforce through Joomla, using a simple form. Then, when a visitor returns to the Web site, they can login using the Joomla login form, be authenticated against Salesforce.com, and then be able to edit their contact information in Salesforce securely.

Pretty darn powerful.

We’re proud to be the first ones developing this connection for the Joomla community, and look forward to working with the Salesforce Foundation to help spread the good word to our non-profit users. Don’t worry business users, we’ve got something in store for you too.

We should be rolling out a roadmap to the development of this component, as well as add-ons for J!Salesforce at the end of December 2006. What would be nice is to hear from the community as to what users and developers would like to have this integration piece do for them, so we can make sure we’re meeting the needs of the community.

[Digg this story]

(more…)

This is for all your Joomla Developers out there. When trying to add Joomla javascript to the frontend like the pop calendar, it only works for the registered users. This is because the code currently only loads joomla.javascript.js for registered users and when joomlaJavascript has been set in the mainframe object. So what do you do then? Add this one liner to your code:

$mainframe->set(’joomlaJavascript’, 1);

Thats it, now you have the javascript pop calendar in the frontend. Little update on the current calendar installed with Joomla. It is one created by dynarch.com. Joomla currently uses 0.9.2 and with the next release they should be upgrading to 0.9.4 which allows for adding of time allow with the date.

I know alot of you have been asking when is Joomla 1.0.12 coming out or when is 1.5 coming out. Well, Johan gives us an update. I would also like to add that they have just released the Joomla 1.0.11 User Manual. Alot of great information here and is a great illustration of the good work the documentation workgroup is doing. Download the pdf here.

Joomla Tuesdays are coming back. And for those who continue to doubt that someone with an art history degree can run a web site? We want you there.

When we built Soapbox, PICnet’s low-cost, easy-to-set-up content management system exclusively for Non-Profits, we used the Joomla! content management system as its foundation. There were lots of reasons for that. But the main was that Joomla’s — and, by extension, Soapbox’s — universally acclaimed ease-of-use makes it a great fit for many nonprofits, who often make do without a large technical staff.

(more…)

So I know a lot of you think that Joomla! is incredible because it does everything, but as the saying goes “Computers are only as smart as the users using them”. Joomla does a lot of great things out of the box, but bad administrating can make any Joomla install unsafe.

Brad found this forum posting about the “sad, but true” things that some administrators do. For those of you who do these, I hope this opens your eyes and you learn from them, but for most of you, I know you’re doing the right thing.

Earlier this year, PICnet Inc. started working on another exciting new project with Alan Rosenblatt, at Turner Strategies, to create an online infrastructure for 3,000 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, patent lawyers and more! This network will serve as a platform for business owners and angel circles/venture capitalists to find each other, thus developing a network for innovators to simply “plug” into.

Using Community Builder and other inextensible Joomla! components, we are practically building another MySpace or Facebook to help fellow entpreneurs grow their companies. Cheers to the “Innovators Network“!

We’ve been proud supporters of David Milner’s creation in New York, the Not-for-Profit Webmaster Round Table. Now as David brings the round table to Washington, PICnet jumped at the opportunity to host!

The round table has grown since its inception in 1999, and now hosts a wide variety of non-profit organizations that come together every few months to share ideas and best practices in Web development.

Friday, January 12th, 2006 from 2 PM EST to 5 PM EST

PICnet
1341 G St, NW, Suite 1100
Washington, DC 20005
(Google Map, Yahoo Map)
If you’re interested in joining us for this latest round table, please email David directly.