Design vs. Develop

A lot of people have been asking “when will there be a copy of Podcast Suite for Joomla! 1.5?” If you’re one of those people, I have some good news for you: we’re close to a beta! You can take a sneak peek at the code here. If you’re handy with SVN, you can also check out a copy and give it a spin. My hope is to get a beta out this month.

Recently, I recorded a Joomla! 1.5 video training series for Lynda.com. As of today, the videos are now live! This video series walks you through installing Joomla!, adding content, creating navigation, and adding extensions. You can sample some of the first videos on the site before subscribing to the Online Training Library.

Earlier this week, we had the 2008 DC PHP Conference at George Washington University. A lot of new faces showed up this year and we had quite a few speakers from the local community. Here are some of the sessions I found particularly interesting:

Automated Unit Testing. Mike Lively presented PHP Unit, which I will definitely be using the near future. His presentation on Monday morning was very helpful and made Unit Testing seem much more approachable. He had an afternoon session as well with more PHP Unit tricks (like mock objects and database testing) that I’ll have to look into on down the road.

Fed Up of Framework Hype? Tony Bibbs had a lot of straight-talk about how to choose a framework, why you might want one, and when you could stand to roll your own. He brought up the fact that you need to keep is flexible enough so that your highly talented programmers can stay productive, while keeping it consistent enough for less experienced coders.

SPL Iterators. A lot of Eli White’s presentations I’ve previously seen have been about scaling challenges he’s worked on at Digg. He seemed just as excited to talk about beautiful code :). One of his samples was so short and succinct, I ended up tweeting (forgive the 140 character formatting) it.

Security Centered Design. In his own words, Chris Shiflett hijacked a security talk to cover User Experience. However, he did a good job of tying everything back to security; people have certain expectations for how a web application should behave when they’re logged in. He also plugged myVidoop: the secure, passwordless OpenID provider that some friends of mine work for :).

Also, Keith Casey moderated an IDE/text editor panel. He asked a good set of questions and fortunately there was no physical violence, or even shouting.

This was also my first conference where Twitter was out in full force, except when it was down early on Monday morning. You can catch up on most of the tweets here.

I think this time everyone brought down Twitter by talking about Amazon.com’s downtime.

You’ve probably received fraudulent emails from people posing to be a bank wanting you to log in to your account. A few weeks ago, I received a phone call from an automated machine claiming to be my bank with a message for me. It then asked for the last four digits of my social security number; hung up immediately and decided that I would call my bank later.

Today, I received a similar phone call and hung up again. I called my bank right away and they confirmed with the security department that they did not place this phone call. Had I given this information, who knows what would have happened?

REMEMBER: only give personal information when you initiate a phone call with a trusted number. NEVER give your personal information when someone calls you.

The first JoomlaEXPO was held this past Friday in Chicago. We had a full house with 251 people attending.

We had three sessions on Joomla! coding (including mine) that each focused on a different aspect of Joomla! programming. My session was on the differences between coding in Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5, highlighting some of my new favorite features. (You can download the PowerPoint slides here.) Azrul then followed up with a full presentation on how to create SEF URLs for your component while avoiding some common SEF URL pitfalls. Steve talked about different framework features and debugging tools, then unveiled his Community ACL component.

I was also able to hear Victor Drover’s session on GPL software business models. He’s currently using a hybrid model where he sells access to his site and also does consulting work. His main point was that chasing down software pirates is a waste of time, so make it a moot point by offering your software under the GPL.

The one thing that struck me about this event was that the third-party developer community was very well represented. However, no one group totally dominated the conference: we a had a good mix of template designers, website producers, system admins, hosts, programmers, and Joomla! users. At the beginning of the event, we were given a set of color-coded stickers to identify ourselves. In a community as diverse as Joomla!’s, this was definitely helpful!

Special thanks goes out to the conference organizers. I know firsthand that putting together an event of this type takes a lot of effort and persistence. This one was very well attended for a first (or even a third) year conference and I’m already looking forward to the next!

UPDATE: Now you can see the presentation below:

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Quick Joomla! University update: there is a slot available in my Creating Joomla! Extensions session on May 17th in Chicago. I’ll be covering the basics of how to create a component, a module, and a plugin. We’ll then get into Model-View-Controller style components and go over some commonly performed Joomla! programming tasks. Sign up today!

UPDATE: The course is now filled.

JoomlaEXPO 2008 recently registered its 200th attendee. To celebrate, fifty more seats have been added! Get them before they’re gone!

In case I haven’t already invited you through Facebook, the 2008 Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition will be held 1pm Saturday at Georgetown University. All programmers, designers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and social media experts: clear your Saturday afternoon schedule and show up. Keith has the details.

I upgraded Wordpress this evening and decided to change the permalink structure. This is probably a bad idea in general, but I was having problems where you couldn’t link to an individual article. You would see all of the articles for a day, then get taken to an anchor for the specific post instead.

I promise no more hijinks.