Joomla! One Point Six and Crawl

After hearing more news about Joomla! 1.6, I wanted to share my thoughts on what this could mean for Crawl.

An Open Day

In 2009 I attended the Melbourne Joomla! Day. It was one of the most exciting Joomla! experiences I have ever had. The highlight was watching Rob Schley of JXtended talk about the future of Joomla! This year I missed the whole affair due to work commitments, which is a big shame.

However, I was delighted to watch the amazing Andrew Eddie give his Joomla 1.6 presentation on the Joomla! Community Blog. The post has the video of Andrew’s presentation embedded, and it’s a must watch for anyone who was unable to attend what sounds like an amazing day.

Andrew focuses largely on the new permissions system in Joomla! 1.6, what the experts call ACL (Access Control List). The big jump being the end to sections, being replaced by nested categories.

The immediate potential is obvious, the core Joomla! content type of articles will soon be super flexible and sophisticated. It will allow custom tuned access groups for categories and even specific articles.

But what excites me the most, is that this core technology can now be freely expanded into other Joomla! extensions.

For my own Joomla! website at crawl.net.au, we are very heavy users of two main extensions*:

1. EventList (the event management component that manages the venues and events on Crawl)
2. Labels (the tagging component that manages the artist name tags applied to the EventList events)

EventList on Crawl

EventList has many potential uses for a modern ACL base, which I am sure EventList and other Joomla! event extension users and developers are already discussing.

What I am most excited about is the potential to realise a long term goal of Crawl in allowing users to be able to take full ownership of their own “Venues”. Since we started Crawl, we have manually updated the website with events for Artist Run Initiatives (ARIs: usually art galleries, but often non-conventional art projects such as publications, nomad projects and most recently an art vending machine!).

We love doing this as it is our way of supporting ARIs in Australia, but it also clear that there is a real desire and community driven need to take ownership of these “Venues” and “Events”. Keeping this in mind, we have always wanted to be able to offer ARIs the option of taking ownership and managing their own space on Crawl. The ACL in Joomla! 1.6 is a massive step in making this possible.

Labels on Crawl

Whenever we post a new ARI event on Crawl, we tag the event with the artists, curators and writers names. This has been wonderful and powerful. Currently we have over three thousand artist names tagged on Crawl.

A possible next step is to open these artist tags (or Labels in the JXtended parlance) to the individual artists. This could allow them to add biographies, photos or links to their Artist Tag. This is functionality built into the powerful extension of Labels, but with the ACL in Joomla! 1.5 is not practical. But with the new ACL in Joomla! 1.6, things get interesting, very interesting.

If you have any thoughts on this that you would like to share, feel free to email me at nicholas@crawl.net.au.

*The third extension would be JomSocial, which is not pertinent to this post as it has it’s own internal (also not open source) ACL system.

The extensions above represent only the components that handle content effected by a new ACL system. For a more comprehensive list of extensions used on Crawl, you can check out our site credits.

Filed under: Joomla 1.6 Development, Joomla! in Melbourne

The JXtended Finder 2.0 Beta

I have just finished installing the new beta of JXtended’s Finder component, and it works beautifully.

The first thing that you notice after installing the component is the very cool Googlesque predictive search terms that Finder provides. The only thing missing is the ability to be able to tap down on the keyboard and press return to search. Right now you need to click on your desired search query from the list and then press return.

There is further polish when you see your list of search results. Every instance of your search term is highlighted:

And then  when you click on on of your results, Finder continues to highlight the query!

The best thing about Finder is that it’s an index based search component. This means that it searches a single table of entries rather than the whole site. This means:

1. Speed: this search is so speedy.
2. Control: you can publish and unpublish your items in the search table to be displayed in results. Ie: you can turn off the custom 404 page, remove dead links, choose which types of components articles should be displayed (such as contacts, or weblinks).

The only drawback from this type of search is that any type of content to be searched needs a plugin to talk to Finder. JXtended builds in plugins for all core Joomla! components, and many third party components. Check out their website for more info.

Filed under: Third Party Updates

More news coming soon

It has been a while, but more posts will come soon. I promise!

Update: Two new blog posts with more coming over the next few months. I had forgotten how writing down the design and architectural problems I face really do help with the process.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Of Templates and Components Part I

Two weeks ago, I made public the work that was done on the redesign of Crawl. I use the term redesign as it signifies a reformatting of the same content, but in a different configuration. This term is not entirely apt for this particular phase of the Crawl website. In past redesigns, the ordering of the content, the architecture of the content and the ways the content can be interacted with did not change. But with this most recent phase, things did change.

The impetus for this change came from an extension. This extension was a component called JomSocial. JomSocial (JS) is the extension from the Malaysian based Joomla! developer Azrul. JS is a social networking extension for the Joomla! CMS. In some ways JS is trying to be a clone of Facebook. This is not surprising, Facebook is the most successful and dominant social network in the world (in terms of standalone commercial social networks). But within JS are features that while popularised by Facebook have emerged as social networking staples. In other words there are features that are part of JS that are not concretely connected with the closed and proprietary system of Facebook but have become known as social networking tools. Some of these tools include:

• Status Updates
• Profile Pages
• Walls
• Photo Sharing (and any other form of content, text, links, video etc…)

None of these concepts are new.

Status Updates are merely public diary entries.

Profile Pages are merely evolving biographies.

Walls are merely guestbooks.

Photo Sharing and the sharing of other content is as old as Art.

But when you combine them into a single service, they have the potential to become powerful. In the case of Facebook, they combined to form a behemoth of free private services designed to sell ads and market trash.

But the benefit of the homogenisation and normilisation of social networking services like Facebook and its precursors such as MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Blogger, Second Life and AOL among others is the spreading of the awareness that simple social constructs need not be foreign fields in an online context.

This lesson is of great benefit to niche audiences. Audiences such as people involved in the Artist Run Initiative world in Australia. An Artist Run Initiative is an organisation run by artists, not for profit, but to benefit other artists. It is for this concept that I founded Crawl two years ago.

Crawl began its life as a series of Joomla! articles and a dozen events in EventList running on Joomla! 1.0.28.

It now runs on Joomla! 1.5.10, and the last extension I installed was JomSocial.

Filed under: Social Networking

A Return to Blogging

Last year I stopped blogging about Joomla! after the a tense stream of comments about the previous post. It just didn’t feel fun anymore. It has been only recently that after starting to post on Twitter about Joomla! that I wished to write in longer form about my Joomla! experiences.

So here we go again, with comments off.

Filed under: Blog News