Joomla must be doing something right if Google is impressed. Wilco posted a little blurb about Google going to Joomla!Days. He quotes the Google rep on how impressed he was of how Joomla was run and then invited them to speak at the Googleplex on December 21. If you didn’t believe Joomla was the best CMS before, I don’t know how you can’t believe it now.
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.
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.
Our good friends at Aspiration are always up to something exciting, and this time, they’ve outdone themselves again. Since Gunner has a much better way of putting these events to words than I can, below is a great copy/paste from their email announcement, which I think sums up the event nicely.
What we’re looking forward to is what I consider a cross of management and development skill sets, since this will be more focused on systems than the Advocacy Developers conferences, and more output driven than the tried project management summit in NYC last year. I highly recommend that those in our NPO/NGO community that are pushing forward non-profit software solutions to come join us!
And now, a few words from Aspiration about the event.
After brainstorming with our friend Holly from N-TEN, I’ll be leading the first Ask The Expert session on November 16, 2006. The topic? Joomla!
November 16, 10:00 am Pacific / 1:00 pm Eastern
When I talked with Holly a few weeks ago, she was saying that N-TEN was looking for ways for people to share knowledge with others in the community, outside the confines of the annual NTC. This is a great opportunity to try reaching out to the community with hands-on guidance, something that has been missing (but getting better!) at NTCs.
As the N-TEN site says:
“We know you have questions, and we’ve found a way to make it easier for you to get answers. Once a month we’re bringing an expert online to answer your questions. For one hour at a scheduled time, our expert will be available via online chat to answer your questions and point you to the resources and tools you need.”
So, bring forth your Joomla questions! It doesn’t matter if you’re an accidental techie, a developer, or someone just trying to figure out what the word “Joomla” means. Come one, come all, it’s free!
Update: Johan Janssens, the lead developer of Joomla, might be joining us for the session, per his posting on the Joomla Forums!
Check out the N-TEN blog posting on this.
Hemingway. Twain. Thoreau. Ozimek.
Finally, after more than a year of preparation, the 5th edition of the Policy and Politics in Nursing and Health Care recently arrived at the PICnet office in DC last week with the poetic writings of yours truly. That’s right, they even were kind enough to put my MPP after my name, something my doctor friends are sure to look at with disapproval.
I had an opportunity to pen a chapter on distributed campaigns, something I’ve been very keen on discussing with anyone willing to listen over the past 3 years. Covering everything from the Deanspace phenomenon to the services of our friends at Democracy in Action (that’s right DIA, you’re in a textbook now), I outline the fundamentals of a online advocacy campaign.
With book companies offering up Clinton-like advances now, I probably won’t have much time to talk if you call with your own critique on the work; however, don’t let that stop you from buying the book. Buy it, turn to page 173, and enjoy. Then, read the rest of the book of course, lots of smart people came together to compile some amazing materials.
As Non-Profit Soapbox continues to grow in the non-profit community, we have listened and responded to our clients’ ideas, pains, and comments. Surprisingly, what we hear most doesn’t have much to do with the core of Soapbox and Joomla, but rather the struggles of linking together a Web site with an organization’s database, or CRM system.
We haven’t taken this issue lightly, and as we discussed two weeks ago, we’re heavily involved in building bridges between Soapbox and the leading CRM systems for non-profits, starting with Democracy in Action.
What makes Soapbox a success for non-profits is that it goes beyond the core of just being a Web site manager, and allows organizations to connect more seamlessly to their CRM systems. That ability to present data from the database, and choosing the presentation of that data in the Web site is what will be the main differentiator between CMS choices for non-profits.
As CRM vendors are feeling the pressure from clients to provide open APIs, PICnet is stepping up quickly to act on this new opportunity for our clients. Although we’re weary of the all talk and no walk, we’re willing to take vendors on at their word. We’re building the bridges between Soapbox and the following CRM systems:
Our goals are simple when building these bridges:
Over the next few weeks, we will be releasing J!DIA to the community as an open source component for Joomla. Soon thereafter, we will begin working with GetActive and Salesforce.com to build similar functionalities for building bridges between Web sites and databases. Stay tuned, we’re empowering non-profits with choice.
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.
Tomorrow at 10am is the great Open API event, hosted by N-TEN. You can follow along Friday, October 20, at 10:00 am Pacific time. You can listen in by calling 866-740-1260 and entering the passcode 3979000.
Now that the formalities are out of the way, I want to get down to business. I’m wondering if all this talk about open API’s is just a bunch of Web 2.0 mumbo-jumbo coming out of vendor’s mouths just to keep their clients feeling like they’re part of the hip Web crowd…and helping keep clients calm once they realize how potentially difficult it is (pre-open APIs) to share data outside the vendor’s silos.
In fact, I wonder if any of the vendors participating in this discussion tomorrow can explain how it’s in their best interest to make it easier for organizations to share data between different applications. All the talk and quotes I’ve seen on the N-TEN blog seem to be talking about the great benefits that non-profits would get from open API’s, but without there being a fiscal or competitive benefit for a company to invest time and energy into building these APIs, I’d say I’m skeptical as to exactly who, and how quickly , entrenched vendors will be opening up their databases for others to access remotely.
Yeah, Flickr, Google Maps, and others have shown the value of open APIs. But they win using open APIs for a different reason: they become “stickier”. In the pay-for-service model that all of these vendors follow, open APIs would seem to make accounting departments’ heads spin.
I’m very interested to see who talks the talk, and who walks the walk tomorrow.
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.
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