Posts Tagged ‘joomla’

Quick reminder: the early bird rate for Joomla EXPO 2008 ends tomorrow night; register now as tickets are selling very quickly!

UPDATE: it appears that the early bird rate has been extended through Saturday the 29th.

In addition to Joomla! Expo, I’ll also be one of the trainers for Joomla University the next day. My specialty will be in writing Joomla! 1.5 extensions from scratch. However, if you’re more interested in security, SEO, templating, tinkering, or just getting your first site up, there are sessions there for you too!

The first JoomlaEXPO will be held in Chicago on May 16th. Speakers include Barrie North (CompassDesigns.net and JoomlaShack.com), Tom Canavan (JoomlaJabber.com podcast), Victor Drover PhD (JCal, Anything-Digital.com), Steve Pignataro (corephp.com), Azrul Rahim (JomComment and MyBlog, azrul.com), Steve Burge (SEO Expert, alledia.com), and some guy named Joseph LeBlanc. The local JoomlaChicago will also be on hand with Mike Carson (online training, itdtraining.com) and John and Linda Coonen (web consulting and marketing, CoffeeGroup.us).

This promises to be the largest gathering of Joomla! professionals to date; you won’t want to miss it! Tickets are $100 at the early bird rate and seating is capped at 200, so register now!

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the differences between Joomla! and Drupal, as people seem to ask me about this all too frequently. The best analogy I can come up with is this: Drupal is like a model airplane, while Joomla! is like a model train set. Both accomplish the same task: keeping an 8 to 80 year old entertained for several hours by modeling a mode of transportation. However, both accomplish this task in different ways.

When you open the box for a model airplane, you’ll find a lot of little pieces. The fun of putting together a model airplane comes through learning how they all fit together. You see all of the details of the fuselage; the representation is usually highly accurate.

When you start a model railroad, you’ll get a toy train engine with a few cars and some tracks. The engine and cars come preassembled, but you still get to lay out the tracks and experiment with different configurations. Assuming you have things wired correctly and the engine is on the track, your model train will start moving as soon as you flip the switch.

It would be highly contentious (if not flat out false) to claim that one of these toys is inherently better than the other. They are simply different models of real life vehicles. You will learn different things through each, but still end up with scaled models in the end.

I like my “model train” CMS. I’ve tried the “airplane” CMS and simply don’t like it as much. Each time Drupal makes a new release, I download it to see what’s new. I’m particularly pleased with the installation process: it’s much smoother than what it was a few years ago. If you like Drupal and it serves your needs, don’t let me stop you from using it: it’s good software. But I’m sticking with Joomla! because I prefer its approach over Drupal’s.

(via OSC)

Anthony weighs in on features for Joomla! 1.6. I’d have say that I argee with him. Is there anyone out there who uses the Banners, Weblinks, and Newsfeed components to such an extent that it would be highly inconvenient to leave them out of the core? I personally don’t use these components (whenever I want a banner, I usually reach for a content module).

In January, my New Year’s resolution was to make more resolutions today: Chinese New Year. Solely because Chinese New Year is more than a month later.

So here goes:

• Go electronic/automatic with as much of my record keeping and business handling as possible. There are a lot of things I could be doing electronically but have still been doing on paper or through the mail. Also, I need to come up with a better system for handling recurring tasks and scheduling. If it comes down to it, I may end up with one of these or these. (sigh)
• Rewrite the Daily Message tutorials, Podcast Suite, iWebCal, and my book to catch up with Joomla! updates. The latter should come out first.
• Validate all of the markup on jlleblanc.com. Last year, I finally got on the whole semantic web bandwagon and haven’t fallen off yet. What was the catalyst for all of this? jQuery. When I saw how it was all CSS selector-based, DOM programming and the benefits of validated markup simultaneously made sense. The pursuit of validation is also helping me maintain Section 508 compliance at work.
• Blog more and worry less about writing essays. When I started blogging, I actually wanted to start a site where I would keep a repository of opinions on specific topics, refined over time. This doesn’t really seem to work as people are much more familiar with off-the-cuff blog posts.
• Incorporate.
• Launch a major web-based service. Oh, so you’d like to know what’s cooking at Chez LeBlanc? You’ll just have to wait and see

A month ago, I switched not only the theme and title of this blog, but also the software underneath from Joomla! to WordPress. I always intended to expand my Joomla! based blog into something more substantial; a new way of presenting and sorting information, opinions, reviews, and recommendations. However, I didn’t get very far in achieving this.

Meanwhile, blogs have become so prevalent that people will assume you website is actually a blog if it feels somewhat like one. With this in mind, visitors have a certain expectation of how your “blog” will behave; if it doesn’t, people can get confused and possibly frustrated. So now I’m using blogging software instead of content management software.

Here are my impressions of WordPress. The user interface gets all the points for KISS principle. Writing posts, seeing new comments, scanning incoming links, and adding images are all a pure joy! It’s also nice to see the autodraft saves so that you don’t accidentally lose your work. WordPress also has enough functionality for building a very basic non-blog website if you need one. Finally, I’m happy to see the WordPress folks following a web software convention I feel is crucial: the backend has an interface distinctly separate from the one seen in public. (Not going to mention the names of any offenders here.)

However, not all is rosy with WordPress. Within hours of putting up my blog, dozens of spam comments were pouring in, making me wonder whether I should turn back before it was too late. Fortunately, they died down after a couple of days and a few keyword filters. I have comments set to be displayed only after the email and name have been approved. (If you use your OpenID, your comment will appear automatically.)

The other gripe I have about WordPress is the templating. I took a peek to see if I could quickly throw together a basic theme to match my main website. Unfortunately, I was in for a rude surprise. While this isn’t the worst system I’ve seen, WordPress themes are broken into too many pieces in the wrong places, with poor internationalization to boot. It’s very irritating to work in a world where an HTML tag opens in one file and closes in another; this is just begging for mistakes to be made.

Despite these speed bumps, I’m definitely enjoying WordPress and will change the theme to something else once I find one that suits my tastes (or have time to build a new one).

Joomla! Doc Camp is going well so far. I copied over my JUser tutorial (original with component download is available here) and created some JTable documentation from scratch. We still need people to document not only the code, but also the admin interface. Come on over and join in, we’re going through Monday!

Tech events in DC for 2008 are getting off to a fast start. First, there’s Widget DevCamp DC on January 25th (Friday evening) and 26th (all day Saturday). BarCamp DC was a great time last Fall where lots of web/programming techniques were shared. Widget DevCamp hints that there may be some actual coding going on! (of course, this depends on who shows up and what ideas are kicked around).

The regular DC PHP Developer’s group is scheduled to meet on February 13th. This will blow away all other tech events for the year, because we will be having a face-to-face text editor war! I’m so psyched! Go Textmate!

Finally, Web Content Mavens will be having an Open Source Content Management System discussion on February 27th. I’ll be representing Joomla!, Keith Casey will talk about Drupal, and other people will talk about Alfresco, WordPress, and Textpattern.

See you at all of these events!

If you run a website, here’s a resolution you can keep: make sure your host is up to date. This is something that only takes a few minutes to check and can help you avoid hacker-induced headaches. With PHP being the most popular programming language used on the web, chances are your site uses it. You’re definitely using PHP if you use popular programs such as Joomla!, Drupal, or WordPress. Even if you keep these programs up to date with the latest patches, your site can still be at risk if your host doesn’t keep PHP itself updated.

If you’re running Joomla! or Drupal, checking your current PHP version is easy. In Joomla! 1.0.x, log into the administrator backend and go to System > System Info. The PHP version will be listed on this screen as well as under the PHP Info tab. In Drupal, use your admin login, then go to Administer > Logs > Status Report.

Aside from this software, there are other ways you can get the PHP version number. Most shared hosts often give you a control panel where you can log in and manage your account. If your host offers CPanel, the PHP version number will usually be displayed on the front page in the left column.

As a last resort, it’s easy to create a phpinfo() page you can use to get the version information. Open up a plain-text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit and add the following code:

<?php

phpinfo();

?>

Save this file as version.php (or anythingyouwant.php) and upload it to your web server using FTP to you web root directory. Then go to http://www.yoursite.com/version.php. Delete version.php from your server right away: you just want it to be available for a moment so you can get the information.

You now have your PHP version number. So now what?

As of this writing, the current version of PHP is 5.2.5. If this is the version you have, congratulations! Your host is up to date with the latest stable copy of PHP there is. If you have a version of PHP that starts with 5 but isn’t the latest, check with your host to see if they’re in transition. A lot of hosts set aside some servers with PHP 5 when it first came out in July of 2004 for testing purposes. You might be on one of these servers.

If your PHP version is 4.4.74.4.8, your host has the latest stable version of PHP 4. Ask and see if they have a plan in place for upgrading your account to PHP 5. If your host is running a version of PHP earlier than 4.4.7, look for a new hosting provider immediately: your host is at least 7 months behind in applying security patches. Don’t count on them keeping you up to date in the future, they’ve already failed you.

As of this past Monday, no new versions of PHP 4 will be released and it is officially obsolete. On August 8th, the PHP team will not even release security updates for version 4.

UPDATE: the PHP team released 4.4.8 the day after I posted this. The switch from .7 to .8 represents some security patches. It is not considered an entirely new version of PHP; everything should still be backwards compatible. If you are running 4.x.x, make sure your host upgrades you 4.4.8 promptly.

Aside from keeping up to date with software that’s being actively developed, there are other reasons to move to PHP 5. It performs faster and has new features your friendly open source programmers desperately want to use. The Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress teams have all avoided writing code that only works on PHP 5 to make sure that you can run their software. Now is the time to return the favor and go with PHP 5!