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 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.

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.

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.

So here we go again, with comments off.

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.

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

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.

You can go to the Joomla! Juice website here, or subscribe via iTunes through this RSS feed.

This image was taken by Rastin Mehr (Aristocrat), one of the talented developers at RMD Studio.

The image shows the Persian goddess Anahita, which clearly was the inspiration for the naming of their in development Joomla! Social Networking project. Rastin describes some of the backstory of this image on his flickr page:

The ancient Persian Goddess “Aredvi Sura Anahita” the divinity of Water associated with Fertility, Healing, and Wisdom in the universe. She is also associated with War, Protection, and Peace. Anahita means “the immaculate one”.

(The) Sculpture was first created by my grand uncle Jallil Ziopour. He was a Fine Arts university professor, cubist artist, and anthropologist. I think he reproduced the sculpture of Anahita based on his many findings during his excavations in Iran (not too sure which area exactly. ) He gave me that print in person when I was 6 or 7 years old.

Click here to read the full story, very interesting.

Image above Released by Rastin under Creative Commons (some rights reserved). Click here to read license.