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

Getting MyJoomlaNews.com domain approved through OSM

Note: Permission to re-produce all material here has been generously given by Open Source Matters Inc. (OSM)

I though this might be of interest to other members of the Joomla! community, as I suspect that there are other websites that use the Joomla! trademark, and may not be aware of how to go about obtaining the correct permissions to do so safely and respectfully.

A couple of months ago (long after starting this blog I am embarrassed to say), I submitted MyJoomlaNews.com for permission to use the Joomla trademark within a domain. You can read the form at this link: http://www.opensourcematters.org/content/view/98/68/.

A couple of weeks later, I received this reply:

Hi,

We’ve approved your request for use of the Joomla! name in  your domain http://myjoomlanews.com/. Please note that this approval is not transferable or exclusive and is contingent on continuing compliance with all other OSM trademark policies.

On your site, please make sure that the first prominent use of the name Joomla! has the trademark symbol (R in a circle). Also, include the following staement: ” The Joomla!(R)  name is used under a limited license from Open Source Matters the worldwide trademark holder.”

Please make sure to keep us up to date with any changes.

Best wishes,

Elin Waring

President

Open Source Matters

It was great to hear back from OSM knowing that I was acting in good faith with the OSM organisation. But I did have one small thing that I wanted to clarify, so I replied:

 

Hi Elin,

Thank you for your email, and for approving my request to use the Joomla! name within my domain. I fully understand the conditions under which this approval is based upon and will comply fully with them.

I would like one small clarification though, does this approval require the ® symbol to be placed next to instances of the Joomal! logo?

Finally, would it be possible to republish these email correspondences on my blog (myjoomlanews.com)? I understand if you would prefer me not to, and I would respect those wishes, but perhaps it could be educational for other members of the Joomla! community to see how the request proposal functions.

All the best,

Nicholas Hudson-Ellis

After this, Elin graciously replied with this:

If the use is of one of our logos that has the symbol it must be left as is. The first use of the name on your site must have the symbol. 

My basic rule is not to disclose licensing agreements we have made with specific peope/companies/sites such as yours. What would be the context in which you would want to publish?  I’m certainly happy to have people know how simple (although slow) we make it to get permissions.  

Elin

 

After seeing that I would be re-producing the emails in a positive context, Elin graciously consented to have me re-produce the emails.

The process above might be unknown to many people in the community, it certainly was to myself. But it is nonetheless very important to work together to protect Joomla! and it’s trademarks for everyone.

Filed under: Blog News , OSM

Can Azrul save Community on Joomla?

8 hours ago on azrul posted on twitter a tasty treat about a new product his company is working on, and a link to a teaser website (http://jomsocial.com).

The product is JomSocial, a social networking component for Joomla! According to the webite, JomSocial will include the following features:

• Custom user profile
• Personal messaging system
• Join and create interactive user groups
• Friend-buddy system

This alone would be powerful and exciting, but if you look at the sample image in the banner on the website, there is another top menu option called Apps. If this reffers to a system of plugins to integrate with other components, then JomSocial could really shake things up.

For those who don’t know, Azrul is the maker of MyBlog and JomComment which are some of the most widely used components in the Joomla! Community.

I am personally a big fan of their work, and use both components above on my main Joomla! website. If Azrul can bring the same elegance to JomSocial as they do to MyBlog and JomComment, we are in for a treat.

It is also worth noting that the Azrul team has been very good with prividing Community Builder plugins for their existing components. This is perhaps why they have developed JomSocial, to create what they couldn’t get in CB.

Links:

• JomSocial
• Azrul Homepage

Filed under: Uncategorized

Icons for your website through the iPhone

I just spent a while looking for a way to change the default screen-grap icon for bookmarked web pages using the iPhone. I finally discovered it through google, but thought it would be worth posting here, as Apple seems to have deleted the official instructions page.

I finally found something close at the CartoonBarry blog:

Step 1: Create custom icons that are 57×57 and save them as PNG files. They can be larger, but Apple will scale them for you.

Step 2: Rename the file to apple-touch-icon.png

Step 3: Upload them to your root directory on your server.

STOP – what if you don’t have access to your root directory? Well, you can add a <link> element similar to <link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/customIcon.png”/> within the <head> element of the page.

Well, this is pretty good but a bit misleading. You can’t follow the instructions and then cut and paste. If you need to create the icon and make it usable, then the code will need to reflect the link and the image source file. For example, this is the code that I inserted into my header:

<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/apple-touch-icon.png”/>

Notice that the link section and the image source have the same name. If you copy this code and insert it into your header on your template’s index.php file, it should work. This does mean however that you can change the code to remove any mention of Apple (sort of). For example you could use this code:

<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/medium-favicon.png”/>

And it will work!

This is the icon that I use on Crawl.net.au

Crawl.net.au iPhone icon

If you are trying this out on an iPhone, you will notice that the version of Mac OS X on the iPhone will automatically apply the shiny filter and the rounded corners to the image. You only need to provide a square original image.

One last thing to mention is that the iPhone takes the title of the website as the name of the bookmark. So if your Joomla! website uses a longish slogan on it’s homepage, it will truncate it. I haven’t worked out a way to get around this yet. It would be brilliant if you could force the iPhone to substitute a different title, that would be brilliant!

If anyone knows the secret, spread the word! Although, I doubt it, as even the Apple and Google websites do not seem to do this.

Filed under: Other, Search Engine Optimisation , favicon, icon, iPhone