Archive for October, 2008

It’s official: preorders are being taken for the second edition of Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development! Thanks goes out to everyone who bought the first edition and offered their praise as well as critiques. I’ve incorporated a lot of the suggestions and the book is better for it. Here are some of the additions to the new book:

• Fuller coverage of the model-view-controller design pattern. This is now introduced much earlier in the book and is used much more thoroughly.
• Use of the MooTools JavaScript framework.
• More of the extras: elements generated by JHTML, pagination, and internationalization among other features.

While helping people get the Podcast Suite up and running, I’m noticing that a lot of people are running vulnerable, outdated copies of Joomla! 1.5.x. Keeping your Joomla! site running with the latest patches is a MUST. The Joomla! core team, working groups, security team, and bug squad all jump in and help write a patch whenver a vulnerability is discovered. However, these patches do no good if they are not applied to your site.

So how do you stay on top of Joomla! security issues and releases? The download page for Joomla! now has a handy form where you can sign up for email alerts. If you prefer RSS, use this feed link. (BTW: the current version as of this writing is 1.5.7, with a 1.5.8 maintenance release around the corner.)

Earlier this week, I attended PHP Appalachia in Pigeon Forge, TN. We rented this ginormous cabin (scroll all the way down) just to hang out and talk about PHP. I finally met several people who I’ve missed in my failure to show up for Zendcon all these years.

As far as presentations went, Ben Ramsey started with his “frankenstein talk” on REST, focusing on how REST is an architecture for the web itself. Brian DeShong showed us how to rickroll people on any phone using WURFL, PHP, and ffmpeg. Matthew Turland talked about the PHP-based IRC bot named Phergie and corrected me on the pronounciation of my last name (he’s correct, it’s Luh-blon instead of Luh-blon-k).

Brandon Savage led a roundtable discussion (although we were actually seated in the living room on couches) about creating a PHP clone of Trac. Brian Moon talked about the process he uses to load all of the world’s products into the dealnews database. Rob Peck talked about using PHP with Asterisk through the Asterisk Gateway Interface. Finally, Paul Reinheimer gave a presentation on Magento and how to let your open-source contributors know they’re appreciated.

Aside from the talks, we soaked in a hot tub, watched movies, played pool, quizzed each other on PHP trivia, and ate some delicious chicken and sausage gumbo made by Matthew’s wife Whitney. The only thing we didn’t do was spend hours on Internet thanks to satellite connectivity. We talked to each other instead