PICnet Blog

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.

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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:

• Democracy in Action
• GetActive
• Salesforce.com

Our goals are simple when building these bridges:

• empower organizations to choose where they place their data
• provide choice for the presentation of data from their chosen CRM
• simplify the Web experience for organiation’s Web site visitors

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.

RobS over at Joomla just posted about the Joomla winning an award for security:

“During what is called the “Deface Realtime Compo” Competition up to 150 Security Specialists, hackers, and crackers bomarded the CMS with attacks for 2 days straight without success. Both Joomla! and PHP-Nuke were evaluated during the competition and both systems received positive evaluations. Along with the positive evaluation, we received a certification from the WebSecure Group, declaring that Joomla! was reliable and recommended for use.”

Read it here.

Google has done it again. The great people at google have tried to make our lives easier with their new invention of Google Code Search. Now I can find bits of code that I otherwise wouldn’t have found. How does it do this? Well google now can traverse into compressed files like .zips and .tar.gz. What does this mean for you? You know how your a good webmaster and make make backups of your websites as websitebackup.tar.gz? Your configuration.php file is one of the files that you just backed up. Guess what. Now everyone on google code search can see your user name and password for your mysql database. How do I fight this? you might as. Simply put your backups below your website directory so it isn’t accessable via the web. Read more about it from the Joomla Developers here and from a Slashdot article here.

So I was just discussing some great stuff with Ryan this morning about integrating Odeo’s Studio into Soapbox. Odeo is the largest podcast directory outside of iTunes. Some exciting stuff is going to developed here. Odeo Studio steps it up with its easy to use Podcast creator. It is a great way to record and post your Podcasts. Integration into your site is easy too. Just a few settings and your ready to have your podcasts up and running. Might be easier than starting up a Soapbox site