Blog

Using Virtualbox for web development and testing purposes

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:50:57 +0000

As web developer you face the challenge to support a wide variety of platforms and browsers. There are some generic tools that help you testing, but sometimes you need those platforms to be available.One way to manage that is to make a multi-boot installation or use several different systems. That is one way to solve this "problem", another way is to use virtualisation. This technique is used to implement a certain kind of virtual machine environment: one that provides a complete simulation of the underlying hardware. The result is a system in which all software capable of execution on the raw hardware can be run in the virtual machine. In particular, this includes all operating systems.

I recently installed the open source edition of VirtualBox and it does exactly this; enabling me to run any operating system as a virtual instance on my desktop system. Installing is pretty straight forward, there is a windows installer for those who want Windows to be their host system, under Ubuntu (or similar Linux distributions) you can use the package manager to install it, or if you want you can compile it.

Virtualbox also provides a full screen option for the host systems. As I have a dual screen, this allows me to seaming-less run two operating systems on each screen. It is even possible to copy/paste information between the two operating systems...how cool is that? I found out that installing the guest additions, which enables the virtual operating system to run in full screen, install very easy under windows. Installing it under Ubuntu 9.04 is a bit more work since there seems to be a small error in the installation script. I found an article that solves that problem pretty quickly, check out the blog on nIxternal site for a brief explanation on how to make it work.

New labs items for prototyping with Joomla!

arno.alvaana@gmail.com (Arno Zijlstra) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:53:38 +0000

Last week I've done a little presentation at the Joomla! Days NL 2009 about quickly setting up prototype sites with Joomla! and I promised the audience some tools to make life easy.

It took some time because a few guys of the JFoobar team are working on a great new venture at abillo.com but here we go.
There are three new labs additions:

You can also read this post here on jfoobar that gives more information about the template. Joomla!, quick, rapid, fast, speedy and custom

Have fun playing around and thanks everyone for listening and giving feed-back.

eZ Conference & Awards 2009

robin.muilwijk@gmail.com (Robin Muilwijk) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:00:00 +0000

In less than one week from now, the 7th annual eZ Conference and Awards event is held in Paris France. Being the largest Open Source Content Management event in Europe, this time it's going to be a special edition, since it's also the 10th anniversary of eZ Systems as a company.

The goal of eZ Conference 2009 is to gather the whole ecosystem :

Developers and customers using or interested in eZ Technology : eZ Publish, eZ Flow, eZ Find, eZ Components or PHP in general

Web Content Management professionals looking at best practices as well as new trends

Digital Media Publishing specialists, eZ getting a leading position in this industry for online magazines and newspapers

What I personally consider to be a big plus for eZ Systems and there ecosystem, is how they recognize there contributing community members and partners through those awards. Nice detail, I also got nominated for this years Awards in the section of "Publication of the year" on an article I wrote. A full list of nominations can be found here.

My personal thanks goes to eZ Systems for the nomination, and congratulations on the 10th anniversary!

Upcoming Joomladay in The Netherlands

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:22:00 +0000

Upcoming Thursday the Dutch Joomladays will be held in Nieuwegein - The Netherlands. As always, the organization has done it's best to get a really exciting program together. There will be multiple session about the upcoming 1.6 release, security, community building, templating...to much to mention. If you are interested in Joomla or a professional Joomla user, this is a must attend event.

Like the previous editions there will be multiple tracks, in Dutch and also in English. Like previous editions we expect a lot of international speakers and visitors, so the program offers something for everyone. The Joomladays in general are great social events, make sure you will not miss this years edition! Not sure there are still tickets available, but take a look at http://joomladays.nl or http://www.joomladays.nl/en/home.html.

Hope to see you there!

Linux.com is using Joomla!

jfoobar.org@gmail.com (jfoobar) — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:24:44 +0000

Linux.com has just relaunched their site, and it is build with Joomla! 1.5. The site looks very good, and has a lot of features showing the ultimate power of Joomla!

Brian Profitt explains the work done in a must read blog post announcing the redesign.

Way to go Linux.com!

CMS Expo Chicago interview

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:57:56 +0000

Amy did a very nice blog about the CMS Expo of past week. During the event I have been interviewed in more depth as a follow up on my keynote. In short the key ingredients (as seen by me) for the success of Joomla will be handled during the interview. Check out the interview on Ustream, and make sure to also look at some other presentations that have been recorded, there are some really nice ones amongst them!

CMS Expo Chicago

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Sat, 02 May 2009 08:49:38 +0000

It's around 5 am here in the morning (local time) and the timezone problems just have inspired me to blog a short feedback on the event. I have given the keynote, short after Mat Asey who dived into the enormous growth of open source. The keynote I gave (check http://www.slideshare.net/willebil/cms-expo-keynote) was focussed on the ingredients that I see as key of the success to Joomla: the usage of a FOSS licence (GPL), an active community (that also includes the commercial developers) and the working groups that provide stucture and collaboration on a day to day basis.

After the keynote I has several interesting talks that where linked to the keynote presentation. I have spoken to a lot of people, and the CMS Expo was a great event where people from different projects (Joomla, Alfresco Plone and Drupal) could meet in a professional way. I want to thank everyone who was there, and especially everyone I have been talking to for their time and energy. See you next time!

Open Source Map

robin.muilwijk@gmail.com (Robin Muilwijk) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 18:50:58 +0000

The Georgia Institute of Technology along with Red Hat have developed an Open Source World Map. This map shows you the development and potential of Open Source in two separate maps in over 75 countries.

The map is a result of a study by Red Hat, more about there study can be downloaded here as PDF, the raw data is available here, this is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License 3.0 license.

Finally, you can view both maps on the Red Hat site. You can switch between the two maps on the top right.

Lyon Poche is using Joomla!

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Lyon Poche is a French Joomla city guide, and was developed using a component with which the newspaper's team can feed the database with a nice interface, export their information to quark xpress with an automatic layout system and publish all their information on the frontend portal. This system has been the "Technological innovation of the year" at the French Press conference this year, and yes, yes...they use Joomla!

Visiting the CMS-Expo...hope to see you there

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:57:23 +0000

Just a short while ago I was invited to do the keynote on the upcoming CMS Expo In Chicago. My keynote will cover the importance of community for the Joomla! Project. I am thinking on the exact content of the presentation for this professional event, but I plan to focus on the power of all together (remember what Joomla stands for?). The time available for the talk is pretty short, so I will focus on why it's good for community members to participate by showing what we've achieved in the past 3,5 years and why Joomla is going strong and still is growing.

Approximately 200-250 are expected to attend the conference, dedicated toward empowering CMS professionals and expanding the use of collaborative CMS solutions like Joomla! worldwide. For those interested, there are 48 training sessions planned, with six training tracks – one entirely dedicated toward the Joomla! Core CMS. CMS Expo training is led by actual users from the community, businesspeople, developers, designers and administrators - who have “been there, done that,” and are there to give hands-on advice to attendees on how to achieve their goals. Attendees leave CMS Expo with a community of contacts, Skype addresses and they can reach out to for honest, point-blank answers on what works, and what does not, when it comes to utilizing the CMS or extension of choice.

Hope to meet you there!