Media Links

#jab10 «J and Beyond» Event in Germany Gathers the Joomla! World

• Source: CMS Wire – This article is about the “J and Beyond” conference that took place in Wiesbaden Germany May 30 - June 1, 2010.  This was the 1st international conference organized by the Joomla! community.

49 E-Commerce & Shopping Carts for the Small Business

• Source: Small Business Trends – This article takes a look at the E-Commerce options available for Small Business. Many options for various solutions, with VirtueMart using Joomla! being one of those options.

A lesson in how to profit from the free for the film industry

• Source: Netribution – A few months ago I downloaded an open source add-on for Joomla!, the (free) software that powers Netribution. So impressed was I after half an hour of using it that I checked out some...
  
  
• Doctoring Joomla!
  
  
  In an exam room with my doctor, I tell him, “It hurts when I snap my fingers this way.” My doctor replies, “stop snapping your fingers that way.” Ah, yes the obvious. Jokes aside, intelligent people, like doctors, break down hard problems into simple steps that don't seem obvious at first. I then proceed to ask him, “I think I need a second opinion, can your system just send over my records?” My doctor looks puzzled. I think to myself, “All those years of medical school and he doesn't know how to send over my records?” Where has the intelligence gone?
  
  

  About a decade ago, I was given an assignment to work on a healthcare project. Back then, web based tools were emerging. And combining healthcare data with web technologies were at an infancy. As the years past, I become involved in companies that were ahead of their time taking advantage of the web to distribute healthcare data to those that needed it. But again, we were ahead of our time. Web based adoption in the healthcare industry felt like .001%.

  In the...
  
  

• Website Case Study: Joomla! Community Magazine
  
  
  The Joomla! Community Magazine is a monthly collection of Articles, News, Reviews and Tips about the award winning content management system, Joomla!. The JCM is staffed entirely by volunteers in the Joomla! community who are passionate about this open source software.

  Basic website information

  Organization: Joomla!

  Website: Jommla! Community Magazine

   

  Organization URL: http://magazine.joomla.org

  Developer: Komrade, a web development agency based in Athens, Greece, creates cutting-edge websites and web applications that balance usable, effective content presentation with strong visual style.
  
  Developer URL: http://www.komrade.gr

  A New Beginning

  One of the keys to the Joomla! Community Magazines resurgence is the community volunteers who have spent over 6 months planning and preparing for the relaunch. The idea resurfaced in a group discussion at All Together As A Whole, and really took off from there. Community Leadership Team member Paul Orwig was asked to step in as Lead Editor to revive the magazine, and then set out on a course to make that happen around October 2009.

  When asked why the need for a magazine when there is a blog in ...
  
  

• Did you know... that you can integrate Magento into your Joomla! site?
  
  
  If you don’t know Magento™ you’ll probably be shrugging your shoulders by now. If you do, you will know that Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source ecommerce platform. It's guaranteed to give you a whole new perspective on ecommerce and it will likely make existing Joomla!™ ecommerce extensions fade straight into the background upon first sight.

  If you have ever worked with Magento before, you will know that it’s administrative backend is quite complex. While feature-richness is a desirable asset for any application, it usually comes with some drawbacks, and Magento – however well designed – is no exception to that rule. Configuring a more sophisticated website can take days with Magento. Operations that seem effortless in Joomla! can be a daunting task from within Magento’s administrator. And then there’s template customization - a process Magento developers refer to as ‘theming’. If you’ve ever had the pleasure to create a Joomla! template... well, it’s nothing like that. Instead, you have to squirm your way through dozens of xml, phtml and css files, and all in different locations.

  Wouldn’t it be great if we could have all that wonderfully...
  
  

• The Joomla! Setup
  
  
  The Joomla! Setup is a series of interviews with developers in the Joomla! community, talking about the tools they use to get the job done, inspired by the setup. We kick the series off with one of the ‘old ones’ of the Joomla! community. Can you tell who it is?

  Andrew Eddie: Wearer of Many Hats

  Who are you and what do you do?

  I’m Andrew Eddie and I turned the big four-zero this year. I started my professional life as a civil engineer and did that for about 10 years. In the background was a love of computers and programming that started when I was 13 when I was introduced to the Apple ][. I cut my gums on Apple Basic, but then learned Fortran and C in university. My final year thesis in engineering was writing a solids model for building wireframe meshes (to punch into structural analysis software). After that I taught myself C++ and when I landed a job as a web developer in 2000 I started to learn HTML and Perl, then PHP came along and I was in my element.

  Right now I work partly for myself, doing...
  
  

• Community Leadership Team: Volunteer Profile-Airton Torres
  
  The Joomla! Community Leadership Team has responsibility to manage the Joomla! forums, the Community website, the JCM, the Joomla! Resources Directory, the Joomla Extensions Directory, Joomla! Events, and Joomla! User Groups. For this issue’s article from the Community Leadership Team, we want to recognize Airton Torres and his significant volunteer contributions.
  
  

  Airton, please introduce yourself to our JCM readers.

  My full name is Airton Vieira Torres. I was born in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil. I have lived in the USA in the Boston area from May, 1989 to May, 1990. I now live in Votorantim, Sao Paulo, Brazil since 1995.

  My family includes my wife Grisiela and my two sons Daniel, who is 21 years old, and Giovanni who is six years old.

  I have attended college (Engineering classes), and I hold technical degrees in Chemistry, Electronics and Computer Science.

  My current job is as a Telecommunications Technician working for the local Telecommunications Company (Telefonica). Before that I have 14 years experience as computer programmer and systems analyst working with many different computer languages, such asBasic, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Delphi, Dbase, and...
  
  

• Production Working Group: Updates
  
  
  The Production Leadership Team manages all areas of Joomla! development, including documentation, design, coding, and development cycle. In addition, the Production Leadership Team manages all areas of the Joomla project which relate to the production of the Joomla! CMS software and it’s documentation. This issue’s Leadership connections contribution from the Production Leadership Team focuses on the status of Joomla! 1.6 as well as some general questions looking a little further into the future.

  How is the the PWG organized to manage these different responsibilities? (Looking here for a sense of what different teams exist within the PWG, and who are the leaders of those teams)

  • Documentation team (Chris Davenport)
  • Bug Squad (Andrew Eddie, Ian MacLennan, Mark Dexter)
  • Translation Teams (Jean-Marie Simonet)
  • Development Coordination Team (Louis Landry, Sam Moffatt, Andrew Eddie, Mark Dexter, Ian MacLennan)

  Do you have an estimate on how many community members are currently involved in the PWG’s activities?

  • Translation Teams: 95+ representing 64 languages.
  • Bug Squad: 50+
  • Documentation: 12+
  • Development: 12+
  • Other??

  Joomla! 1.6 beta 3 was recently released. Are you able to give an estimate on when 1.6 stable will be released?

  • Depends on how quickly we...
    
    
  • Interview: The Joomla! People Portal Admins
    
    
    With the recent launch of people.joomla.org the community has seen a shift in the way it communicates. The new site, branded as the J!People Portal, launched as a “beta” version on 12 May 2010 and was quietly introduced in a simple blog post. Now, after just over two weeks, the new community networking site boasts involvement of over 2500 community members. We decided to sit down with the two site administrators, Philippe Tassin and Sandra Warren, so we could find out the inside scoop and more!

    I wanted to first of all say thanks to you both for your involvement and leadership on this arm of the project. I can only imagine the amount of volunteer hours and brain cells that go into a site like this. Throughout the last few weeks the J!People Portal has taken on a life of it’s own, and though it has had...
    
    

  • Trends in Joomla! Template Design
    
    
    At the end of every year the various design blogs that I follow come up with predictions for what they think will be trends in web design for the following year. I thought it would be a good starting point for the design section of the JCM to see how the Joomla! templates released from the various developers so far this year stack up against the predictions from the wider design community. (Please note: You can see a list of the blogs at the end of the article.)

    The concept of a design trend is of course highly subjective and obviously depends on the aesthetic of the person that is putting the list together and it can only really canvas a small selection of the designs used in the millions of sites that are launched on the web each year. There is however what seems to be a degree of consensus among the lists and from what I’ve observed in my favourite web galleries (see the notes at the end), most of the predictions below certainly cover a majority of the sites that have made it onto the online web galleries so far this...
    
    

  • Joomla! Template Tools Part One
    
    
    The enormous power and flexibility of the Joomla! Content Management System adds complexity and time to the task of creating a truly custom template. In this series of articles, Team EaSE looks deeply into several of the Joomla! Template Community's solutions to greatly speed that process.

    The Joomla! community has so many manufacturers offering templates for our content management system that there's almost always a template to license that will suit anyone's taste. When you want a site to have a truly unique look and feel, though, you will need to create something original. It’s not necessary to re-invent the wheel. Many template manufacturers have begun employing template frameworks on which to base their templates.

    Flexible Design Requires Careful Coding Choices

    If you've ever tried it, you may have discovered that beginning the development of a Joomla! template from scratch is a drag. As with any web project, you'll need to convert the creative concepts of your graphic artist into HTML, graphics and CSS. But the powerful features of Joomla! web site add complexity to this task. A successful Joomla! template, even a graphically simple one, requires special attention to the dynamic nature of menus,...
    
    

  • Interview: Robert Deutz, Events Team Leader for OSM
    
    
    Robert Deutz, founder of Robert Deutz Business Solutions, a software and web development company in Germany specializing in Joomla!, serves as Events Team Leader for Open Source Matters. The following interview explores his approach to organizing global gatherings in the Joomla! community that inspire passion and participation.

    You were recently named Events Team Leader for OSM. Would you please describe your vision for this position?

    It is important to bear in mind that Joomla! is a multi-lingual and multi-cultural community.

    My first goal is to support local Joomla!Days by making it possible for people from the leadership to join in these events, to participate and listen to what is being discussed. Some countries, like Italy and Thailand, host one Joomla!Day a year, with numbers close to 1000 attendees. The last Italian Joomla!Day was in-language with simultaneous translation of the English-speaking guest speakers. These are very strong Joomla! communities who, for the most part, are quite separate from joo­­­mla.org. Local Joomla!Days are our opportunity to connect with the people in these communities.

    Secondly, I would like to see more community-driven events like JandBeyond. While Joomla!Days tend to be business- and end user-oriented,...
    
    

  • JAB 10: Joomla! to infinity and beyond
    
    
    There has long been a desire for the international community to have a chance to meet and exchange ideas. Robert Deutz took a chance and in 2009 began to organize an event focused not just on his native Germany but a global audience. Over the course of almost a year, he recruited several volunteers to help organize and drew on the community to propose and present sessions.

    In Wiesbaden, Germany, May 30-June 1, 2010, this became a reality for the first international event focused purely on Joomla, called J and Beyond. The event drew 190 attendees from 27 countries, over 55 sessions were given, and created a vibrant energy over Joomla.

    Since the sessions were proposed and presented by the community, those who attended created the event. It was not targeted at any specific group, but those who attended were mostly advanced users, intergrators, and developers. The topics covered ranged from product demos, to cutting edge development topics, to marketing techniques, to business practices. It was truly a diverse set of topics presented completely by the community.

    The setting for J and Beyond was a retreat tucked away outside of the main city. This...
    
    

  • Open Source Matters: Report for June 2010
    
    Open Source Matters is the non-profit organization which was formed to manage the legal, financial, and trademark related matters for the Joomla! project. In this issue's Leadership connections article from Open Source Matters, OSM board member Steve Burge shares some of the work that OSM has been doing recently on behalf of the Joomla! project.

    New Board Positions

    The big change happening in Open Source Matters this month is that we’ve been putting in place concrete measures to mature and grow as an organization. Until earlier this year there were only 6 board members and even that number included a treasurer and a legal advisor from the Software Freedom Law Center. As a result board members had to focus on many different things.
    
    In February, the board grew to 10 members, and so increasingly members have been able to specialize. This month, Ryan Ozimek, the OSM President, appointed three of us to different positions:
    
    Events Team Leader: Robert Deutz was recently responsible for the very successful JandBeyond conference in Germany. He’s now going to take the lead in handling Joomla events worldwide.
    
    Trademark Team...
    
    

  • Things to do before your site gets hacked
    
    
    Joomla! is often bashed by unknowledgeable people as insecure. How little they know! The fact is that no system is airtight, unless you do your part to secure it. Most people coward away hearing as much as the word “security” itself. You don’t have to! Securing your site is rather easy, if you know what, where, and how it needs to be completed. This article may only scratch the surface, but will provide you with enough advice to perform a major upgrade in your site’s security in a few, easy steps.

    If you have ever been a regular of the Joomla! forums you have most certainly come across some frustrated post of a panicked user whose site has been hacked. The truth is all web applications suffer from the same phenomenon, not because they are insecure by nature, but because most people do not have the slightest clue on what they are supposed to do to protect their site. Security is not very hard, but is not very straightforward, either. It is a bit like contraception. It is necessary, but no method is bulletproof. As a result, this article is...
    
    

  • Team EaSE Article: Beauty is more than skin deep!
    
    
    When shopping for Joomla! templates, users very often make their choices based entirely on the look and feel the template presents for their content. A user visits the demo pages of a few template manufacturers, looks around and picks a design to represent the content of a new or existing Joomla! web site. What is often overlooked are the ways in which a template is more than skin deep. A template is much more than a web site design: it actually defines the way the web site elements such as HTML, images, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript are sent to the web browser. Have you considered the impact of the these elements to your overall user experience? 

    While design choices are influenced by subjective decisions of preference and taste, a lot of the interaction a visitor to your Joomla! web site is determined by how such elements are delivered to the browser—for instance, the loading speed of your page.

    Though you may not realize it, the first experience that visitors have with any web site is… waiting!...
    
    

  • Work side by side with your competitors
    
    
    Stephen Brandon and Peter van Westen were not a likely pair to be working together. In fact the authors of MetaMod Pro and Advanced Module Manager would have best been described as cordial competitors. But, when users started having difficulties using the two products together, Brandon and van Westen both responded.

    Meet the Developers

    Stephen Brandon
    MetaMod Pro

    Peter van Westen
    Advanced Module Manager

    "I had a few reports in my forum of people that tried to use Advanced Module Manager and MetaMod together, and encountered problems/conflicts. Stephen Brandon mailed me about his side of the story and the question whether I was interested in trying to come to a collaborative solution." van Westen said.

    The two realized the problem was that both were overruling the same core Joomla file. The changes made allowed one module to work but not the other.

    "The class JModuleHelper, defined in libraries/joomla/application/module/helper.php gets the list of modules assigned to a particular menu item (or ALL pages) from the database and also handles some of the work of rendering the modules. The most important role of this class that both Advanced Module Manager and MetaMod Pro need to be...
    
    

  • If you want to build a ship...
    
    
    Welcome to the new Joomla! Community Magazine! All of us on the JCM team want you to know how delighted we are that you are here. There’s quite a variety of content here and you will find lots of great stories to hold your interest. When you read something that makes an impression, please be sure to leave a comment. 

    We are here to tell stories about websites and stories about software, but most of all we are here to tell stories about people. People who create and innovate with Joomla!. People who use Joomla! to share with others, help others, and connect with others. People who extend it and design for it. And people who volunteer their time to build it, improve it, test it, support it, document it, administer it, secure it, answer questions about it, translate for it, and lead it.

    But in addition to all of that, we also want to tell your story. We have put a lot of effort into building a team of friendly and helpful editors who want to help you with your Joomla! story. So as you read these stories, reflect a bit about what you...
    
    

  • Joomla! New England JUG
    
    
    There are Joomla! User Groups all over the world. I am excited about this opportunity to help showcase the various Joomla! User Groups. Even many great relationships are formed on line, there is still nothing that can replace meeting in real life. As great as tutorials, videos and books are being able to ask questions just sometimes is the fastest way to gain knowledge and solve problems.

    Joomla! New England is one of many successful user groups. Founded by Jen Kramer, Joomla! New England has grown to over 300 members from all over the US.

    Joomla! New England was founded in March 2008. Building on experience from being involved in an Adobe users groups, Jen Kramer has helped grow Joomla! New England - in Brattleboro, VT (population 10,000). Initially being setup as a support group for a Joomla! at Marlborogh College Graduate School, the JUG has grown from 10 members to now over 300 from all over the US.

    One benefit Jen finds in the JUG is, many people work on their own and being able to attend a JUG provides a place to take issues and problems and get them solved and share their experice of build...