PICnet Blog

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.

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.

The Joomla core developers use a combination of manual auditing and automated auditing. They use Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner for the automated auditing which has been donated to the Joomla Project. Acunetix WVS scans the site for SQL injection, cross-site scripting and other vulnerabilities, thereby averting possible hacker attacks.

This tool has been run against the 1.0.x trunk (in preparation for 1.0.12) 3 times in the last two months which gives the Joomla Team valuable reports that allows them to hardens the code. This is a great tool to be using, because we all know about human error.

Sitting on one of the Joomla working groups, I see a lot of interesting conversations go across the boards.  Often times, there are quite vibrant discussions on the new Joomla 1.5 framework, especially when it comes to developer opinions.

One of the great members of the documentation working group, Ian, put together the following board post regarding his realization of the power of the new Joomla 1.5 MVC (model, view, controller) methodology that had me laughing.

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I was recently checking out the cool Google Trends. I did a simple search to see the difference in the usage of the 4 major players in the CMS world (Joomla!, Mambo, Plone, and Drupal). If you look at the trend graph here you can see the split between Mambo and Joomla!. Drupal and Plone are nowhere close.

Now this doesn’t say that Joomla! is better than any of the others, its just showing that more people search Google for Joomla!. It’s the popular one. But the trend with open source projects is that the more people like the project, the better it is.

Alright, maybe alone Joomla 1.5 beta doesn’t really change civil society, but it does give us hope. I’ve seen this Joomla team go through a rollercoaster of a year. It seems like it was just yesterday that I was trying to go to my weekly softball game (go Cozimeks!), when I got news from Brian Teeman that the Mambo - Joomla split was happening. Nice to see my “renegade developers” Slashdot story is still up. That produces some good old cowboy imagery, doesn’t it?
Well, in what’s barely been a year, the new team of trailblazers, lead by Johan Janssens, has produced a beta delivery that I believe will really turn up the creative juice in our community. And when I say community, I mean both our non-profit community, as well as the Joomla community.

I hope that through the beta review process, the entire Joomla community is able to contribute their comments as passionately as I and about 100 dedicated Joomla community members have done up to this point. Our work and comments have been hidden in corners of the community that average users don’t normally tread, but now I hope that the similar discussions (without the flames) brew in the coming weeks.

Thanks to Johan and Louis for your leadership in this 1.5 beta. Here’s to an enlightening feedback process!

P.S.: Johan, did you get Joomlasphere from my incessant blogosphere comments at LinuxWorld SF? =)

Joomla 1.5 Beta is finally out. Its been 1 year and some since they began coding. Johan said at German Joomla! Day that:

“this represents 127,000 lines of code and had this been a commercial venture, about 32 man years of effort equivalent to $1.7 million in wages.”

It’s a great system. I love to code in. Would make sense since this release is made for us developers. 1.6 will be more for the end user. Some of the cool features include Internationalization (UTF-8), FTP Filesystem Layer (will allow access to folders that are locked down from the webuser), WCAG Compliance (508 etc.), and a better separation of logic and presentation layer. More explained in the Roadmap. Can’t wait for this to become stable so PICnet will start using it.

So alot of things are changing for Joomla 1.5 and I ran across one of those last night. For redirecting we used “mosRedirect()” in Joomla 1.0. There is a “josRedirect()”, but I was having issues with it last night after I got the latest nightly build. After some research I found “$mainframe->redirect()” which worked flawlessly. Johan confirmed that “$mainframe->redirect()” is the better way to go. Moral of the story “mosRedirect” is now “$mainframe->redirect()”.

During the LinuxWorld SF conference, I had a chance to sit down with the two lead developers of Joomla, Johan and Louis, and chat with them about Joomla 1.5 and some ideas that we and other members of the community have for new features in 1.5.  During the course of a lunch, Louis talked about having people begin to think of Joomla not as a content management system, but rather as a framework for building Web applications.

Pretty powerful stuff.

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