Blog - Joomlatools

We're hiring!

2009-07-08T21:04:00.001+02:00

Nooku's on the hunt for a talented junior/intermediate PHP developer with all the skills to fill a 2-3 month contract working on custom Nooku Framework/Joomla! projects. Ideally you'll have a solid background in PHP, associated technologies as well as some familiarity with Joomla.

Nooku Code Jam in Hamburg

2009-06-10T07:03:00.003+02:00

Last month, the team at Delius, one of our Nooku partners, organised the first Nooku Code Jam in Ghent, Belgium. Among the visitors where Sascha and Steffan from YOOTheme, creators of the Zoo extension. The Nooku Framework must have made quite an impression. Not only are they looking into using it for their new extensions, they also agreed to organise a second Nooku Code Jam in Hamburg, Germany on June 27th.

Nooku Framework MVC Mapped

2009-06-02T23:14:00.011+02:00

More and more developers are getting familiar with the Model-View-Controller design principle for web applications and especially for writing Joomla components. There are many tutorials available, but text is so... well, linear! So we decided to try something different. API documentation (coming soon!) is very useful, but a class inheritance tree doesn't really illustrate 'what to use where' or 'how does it all fit together'. So we mapped out the new Nooku Framework based on real world use and this is the result:

The map is far from complete. The Nooku Framework has tons of features to help you write extensions more quickly, more secure and more extensible. If you are developing extensions for Joomla, you will benefit greatly from this new framework. Be sure to check back regularly as we update the map with new features.

Sponsoring the Joomladays NL 2009

2009-05-26T03:40:00.008+02:00

On June 12th and 13th you will be able to find us at the Dutch Joomladays in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands.

We very proud to announce that with the help of our Nooku partners (Delius and CRBM) we are sponsoring this years event. It's shows the way we have grown over the past year. We couldn't have gotten to where we are today without the support of all our partners. Seeing them produce beautiful multi-lingual websites built on Nooku, is what keeps us going.

Buckle up for a great ride because this year we are not doing one but three presentations and as you might have guessed Nooku will the star-attraction. So what are we talking about ?

1. On Friday I'll be giving a plenary session about open source business models titled : 'Why Freedom makes a better business model' If you're in any way working professionaly with open source applications, this will be a great talk to learn more about the business mechanics of FOSS.

2. Also on Friday Mathias and myself will be talking about our beloved and much appraised Nooku extension. For those of you who don't know it yet, Nooku is a multi-lingual content manager for Joomla 1.5. Interested in how to setup a professional multi-lingual site with Joomla. This session will be for you.

3. Finally on Saturday spotlights will be on our new Nooku Framework. The framework brings future-proof Web 2.0 development to Joomla. In this session we'll show you how easy extensions development can be. Together we'll build a simple Joomla MVC extension in fewer lines of code than you ever imagined was possible.

We'll be around from Thursday evening and all through the event, so come and say hi or bombard us with your questions at the Doctor Joomla sessions.

See you all at the Joomladays ! For those of you staying at home, we will be twitting live from the event.

Nooku Framework announced

2009-05-22T05:05:00.006+02:00

Raw coding talent and vision, that's what Nooku is about. It's creating a lot of excitement in the joomlasphere. After months of hard work we are revving up all engines.

Nooku was launched as the extension that changed the way people manage multi-lingual websites with Joomla. In reality, there is a lot more below the hood. The true power is in the Nooku Framework that drives it. Nooku brings multi-lingual power and future-proof Web 2.0 development to Joomla.

What if you combine the development speed of Ruby on Rails, the flexibility of Symfony, and the power of the Zend Framework, with the simplicity of the Joomla Framework? What if you have an API that is so intuitive it speaks for itself? What if every part of your code becomes reusable, extensible and replaceable? Imagine as a developer being able to achieve all this in a fraction of the lines of code you need today. Our Nooku framework delivers this and much more!

The Nooku Framework can be installed in Joomla as a plugin. It allows developers to build more powerful extensions, or even to develop standalone web applications. One of the first major third party Joomla extensions using the framework is Anahita Social Engine and of course the Nooku extension itself.

For more information visit our framework page on nooku.org or follow (@nooku) us on twitter to stay up to date about the latest framework developments.

DOCman support coming soon

2009-02-23T00:44:00.007+01:00

So far the uptake of the Valentine's Day release of DOCman 1.4 Stable is going great: over 25 000 downloads in the first ten days! It's great to see that you guys still like it.

Even though using DOCman is not that hard, setting it up as solid file server, dealing with user permissions, and integrating it with your template and with other extensions, can be tricky. We try to support users on the forums when we can, but our time is limited.

That's why I'm very excited to let you know we've been working on a solution. The key was finding the right people to partner with -- not surprisingly, we found them at our Bootcamps and the Dutch Joomla Days! So very soon, you will be able to get professional support from people who are dedicated to solve your problem.

And it gets better: it's not just for DOCman. We'll tackle all your Joomla problems, and we're supporting every extension listed on the Joomla Extensions Directory. Yes, all 4440 of them!

We're in the final stages of working out the last details, so stick around. In the meantime, YOU can support DOCman as well. DOCman 1.4 is is available for free, but if it has helped you to win customers and deliver projects, we appreciate your donations.

DOCman 1.4.0 Stable released

2009-02-14T11:28:00.024+01:00

I'm happy to announce that as of today, DOCman 1.4.0 Stable (the Valentine's Day Edition) is available for download. I'm also very proud that this week, DOCman has crossed the one million downloads mark on Joomlacode (since March 2007)!

In more good news, MjazTools AutoPopulate (a utility to quickly import many files into DOCman), and AutoThumb (a plugin that generates thumbnails for images in DOCman) are now official Joomlatools plugins. They can be found through the download link below. Notify and BlogTheme will follow soon.

Before installing DOCman or upgrading from older versions (1.3, 1.4 beta and 1.4 RC), please see the included readme file for more information. If you need help, visit the forum, or read the FAQ.

To make sure you are using an unmodified package of DOCman, always download from our official download location at http://www.joomlatools.eu/products/docman/downloads.html.

We also put a new donations page online. We appreciate your contributions!

DOCman Valentine Release

2009-02-05T21:22:00.015+01:00

Looking for a special Valentine's gift for your beloved Joomla site? Look no further! Treat your site to the stable version of DOCman! Yep, we're happy to announce that DOCman 1.4.0 Stable will be publicly available on February 14. This is a bug fix release, so no new features have been added.

To make sure things are going smoothly, we are looking for a couple of beta testers. If you have some experience with testing applications, have access to a couple of different server environments where you can try DOCman, have a couple of browsers installed and know how to write a proper bug report, please mail me at mathias ~at~ joomlatools · eu.

Finally, as you might know we are working in the background on the next version of DOCman, with native J!1.5 support. But we are also working on something special, that will help you get the most out of your DOCman installation. Stick around or subscribe to our RSS feed http://feeds.joomlatools.eu/site/blog (please note that we are now at joomlatools.eu instead of .org)

About DOCman

DOCman is one of the oldest and most popular Joomla extensions available. It gives you full control over your documents, whether you want to offer them to visitors, registered users, intranet users or paying customers. The powerful group permission feature lets you choose which users can access certain documents. The 1.4 release is free of charge, but, more importantly, it's Free (as in Freedom): The GPL license gives you the right to use it on as many sites as you wish, for whatever purpose, see the source code, and modify it to your needs.

SEO Bootcamp report

2009-01-24T17:07:00.006+01:00

How do I know our bootcamps are doing great? Other people are publishing reports before we get a chance to do so: See Joomlacommunity.eu and Web-effect.nl. Our co-organizers Jira.nl took some pictures, and so did the attendees. You could even follow the event live on Twitter! The presentations are available from Jira and on Slideshare.

With all the attention our SEO Bootcamp is getting, there's not much left for me to do. These are the main points to remember:

SEO is not voodoo. We are always trying to understand Google, but in fact it's Google who is trying to understand humans. When a site has great content and is well-organized, it's in Google's best interest to direct users there.
You can be your own SEO expert. Tools like Website Grader help you to understand how SEO works and what you can do to improve it.
SEO is only 20% of the whole picture. SEM or Search Engine Marketing is much more effective. As Google bases it's pagerank partly on popularity, being present on the internet will get you more traffic.

... and yes, as usual the Bootcamp ended in a restaurant with Johan Janssens telling stories about the early Mambo days... ;-)

Best JED response ever

2009-01-18T21:13:00.005+01:00

I don't usually repost stuff on this blog (we have the "What we've been reading"-feed for that in the sidebar). But this is so well written, that I feel everyone who ever used GPL software should read it: Best JED response ever (hat tip to ninjatheme for the find).

Speaking as a developer of GPL software myself: when faced with (however few) users who demand your full undivided attention because they feel you owe it to them, it can be very tempting to relicense your software under a more restrictive proprietary license.
Dear user: If you care about Free Software (as in Freedom), allow GPL developers to make a living. If we can't build viable GPL-based business models, open source software will never amount to more than mere hobby projects.

From the Free Software Foundation website:

Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free.

It's DOCman time!

2009-01-14T22:01:00.010+01:00

Last October we announced that DOCman was taking a quick nap, due to the team's focus on Nooku. With the release of Nooku 0.6 at the end of 2008 we have time again to refocus on DOCman and give it the attention it deserves.

Today we are happy to announce that nap time is over for DOCman. As promised in my previous blog post time for a more in-depth overview of what's cooking behind the scenes.

DOCman 1.4.0 stable

Last weeks we have been working hard to iron out the remaining bugs and issues for DOCman 1.4.0. Work has been completed a few days ago and we are now in progress of doing final internal testing. A stable release is expected in the coming weeks.

DOCman 1.4.x will be the last release to support Joomla 1.0, any upcoming release of DOCman will only support Joomla 1.5 and up. You can rest assured though, we are dedicated to maintaining the DOCman 1.4.x series for some time to come. An end-of-life date hasn't been set yet and will largely depend on the uptake of DOCman 1.5.

DOCman 1.5.0 beta

Work has also started on DOCman 1.5 beta. The 1.5 version will only support Joomla 1.5 and run native. Yes, at last! Other features include a code cleanup and moving the languages file from PHP defines - the old Joomla! 1.0 standard - to INI files. Other plans include moving a number of plugins into the core, for example the AutoPopulate and AutoThumb plugins.

DOCman 2.0.0 alpha

Today we also start to gather feedback for DOCman 2.0. The 2.0 version will be a complete rebuild of core from the ground up, we want to make DOCman 2.0 a next generation web 2.0 document management system. Social features and web 2.0 technologies like AJAX, REST, ... are high on our whishlist ...

While planing the roadmap for 2.0 we would love to hear from you. What would you like to see in DOCman 2.0, how should a next generation document management system work ? Let us know !

Go to: http://ideas.joomlatools.eu/pages/docman to send in your ideas or to vote on ideas that have been submitted already. Your voice counts!

Finally, we are also working to expand our professional services with a professional subscription club for our products. Details are still being worked on. Stay tuned for more information.

Happy New Year from Joomlatools

2009-01-09T00:11:00.005+01:00

To our community members, clients, visitors and friends : We wish all of you a happy and fruitful 2009!

2008 was a great year for us. Our thanks goes out to everyone in our community who has contributed and is helping to make our products better.

In 2009 Joomlatools will be taking a next step in it's growth. Over the last weeks we have been plotting and planning many exciting new things. If you kept an eye on our sites you already noticed a few changes ... there is much more to come.

Most importantly, 2009 will be the year where we return to where it all started, yes that's right, it's DOCman time. DOCman native for Joomla! 1.5 ? You bet ya! Excited? So are we! More news on our DOCman plans is coming in a next blog post, stay tuned.

Finally, we said goodbye to Laurens Vandeput. Laurens, who was primarily working on SITEman left us at the end of 2008 to pursue a career in Java development. We wish him all the best with his new job. Rest assured though work on SITEman is continuing, a first status update is planned for beginning of February.

Oh and before I forget, we recently moved house from joomlatools.org to joomlatools.eu. From now on .eu will be our new home. Make sure to bookmark us !

May 'the code' be with you in 2009 !

100 posts and counting

2008-12-18T12:31:00.011+01:00

Little over a year ago we published our first 'Hello world' post. More then 100 posts later our feed has been viewed over 100.000 times and we had 30.000 individual clicks on our blog posts. A big thanks to all of you who started following us in the past year !

We talked on a variety of topics, from Joomla tips and tricks to brainstorming ideas, our bootcamps and off course updates about our own products. I did a bit of digging in our archives and compiled a list of the 10 most read posts based on different statistics :

We also saw many of you comment on our posts, sometimes because you where excited other times because you didn't agree. We hope to see more of you voice their thoughts in the future. At Joomlatools we believe that a sign of an healthy community is the way it's capable of discussing it's ideas. Here is a list of the most commented on posts :

Joomla.org : the lost sites
Searching & Filtering in SITEman
Nooku 0.6 : pushing Joomla to it's limits
Johan Janssens recognised as CMS most valued person
Are white papers really helping Joomla ? (comments got lost during migration to disqus)

What can you expect from us next year ? More on that in a follow-up blog post.

Joomla, meet Alfresco

2008-12-10T13:30:00.005+01:00

Today, after a year of hard work, we are proud to announce the release of our Joomla 1.5 integration for Alfresco. In case you don't know Alfresco, it's an open source enterprise content management system solution written in Java.

There are hundreds of thousands of Alfresco users worldwide and millions of Joomla sites. Alfresco and Joomlatools both believe that it is important to collaborate on building open source solutions that work together. So we teamed up, and here's the result: you can now use your Joomla site as a front-end for Alfresco document repository!

What can it do ?

Our integration enables you to access the powerful back-end content repository services of Alfresco, directly from your Joomla site. The integration allows you to manage, preview and track content and digital assets on collaborative Joomla web sites, using Alfresco’s content library. Similarly Alfresco users will be able to search, publish, share, download, and edit content directly on Joomla sites.

How does it work ?

This integration uses the new CMIS standard. It's an Atom-based software interoperability protocol, that was created by EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP. It was developed especially for this purpose: connecting different CMS systems, using a single protocol. CMIS is brand new, so here at Joomlatools we are very excited to be among the first to ever implement it.

Seeing is believing: you can try it for yourself on the demo site, or you can download it at Joomlatools Labs. We opened a new forum to hear your thoughts.

Nooku 0.6 : pushing Joomla to its limits

2008-11-28T01:59:00.010+01:00

Two weeks ago we released Nooku 0.6 at the first Joomladay in Switzerland. The new 0.6 version focuses completely on SEO. With Nooku 0.5 we already had the basic translations features implemented, with the new 0.6 version we are pushing the envelope even further.

Today, if you want to create a multi-lingual search engine optimized Joomla website you need to install a multi-tude of different extensions (multi-lingual, search engine friendly URLs, metadata, etc...) . Nooku 0.6 solves all that out of the box... and makes it all translatable. Neat huh !

Alias validation

One of the features I'm personally very proud of is the new alias validation. Simply put Nooku 0.6 prevents duplicated aliases for all content items (articles, weblinks, categories, sections, banners, etc...). It is also capable of correctly converting (transliterating) a title into an alias on the fly for almost any language.

Nooku 0.6 needed alias validation to allow us to remove the numeric information from the URL's. For example, if two article aliases are identical Joomla will not know what article to show if you remove the numeric information (the article id). Other SEF extensions solve this by storing the URL in the database, this approach requires extra queries and greatly reduces the performances of your site, in some case up to more then 25%.

In our solution the alias validation happens on the fly in the actual edit screen you are working in. Just like with the translation there are no extra plugins to install, or settings to set, it just works. It seems a very trivial feature but we are really pushing Joomla 1.5 to it's limits on this one.

To give you an idea, the validation is a combination of an ajax driven (mootools) server-side form validation solution in combination with a new and more powerful event system we created as part of the Nooku Framework. Like everything we build we try it to be extendible and reusable. By abstracting the alias validation from it's implementation we allow third party developers to easily use it in their own extensions with only a couple of lines of code. The same also applies for the new metadata support we added to the menu manager, but that's a story for another blog post.

Joomla 1.6 SEF: Smarter than humans

2008-11-25T01:10:00.014+01:00

(This is the second part of a little case study on usability. Read "Deconstructing Joomla 1.6 SEF Settings" first.)

Here's the table from part 1 again:

	Option	Tooltip message
1.	Search Engine Friendly URLs	Select whether or not the URLs are optimised for Search Engines
2.	Add suffix to URLs	If yes, the system will add a suffix to the URL based on the document type
3.	Use Apache mod_rewrite	Select to use the Apache Rewrite Module to catch URLs that meet specific conditions and rewrite them as directed
		Warning: Apache users only! Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess before activating.

Let's try to come up with some ways to make it easier to understand.

1. SEF URLs

A user expects Joomla to output a 'good' site, and a good site has SEF URL's. The historical reasons to have a configuration option for this, are no longer relevant in 1.6. My suggestion: turn SEF on in all installations and remove the option.

2. Add suffix to URLs

This feature adds .html, .feed, .pdf... It looks a lot better than adding ?format=pdf. It fits in nicely with the idea that a website has a /my/folder/myfile.html structure, which is a concept everyone gets. So again: let's turn it on permanently and remove the option.

3. Use Apache mod_rewrite

This is the most difficult one, and not entirely solvable. For starters, we could rename the option to "Remove 'index.php' from URLs". This makes a direct mental connection between the setting and the intended effect. The users can see index.php in their URL's, they click the button, and index.php is gone.

Back to our question from part 1: "Can the system decide this without user interaction?" Joomla could:

check whether .htaccess is present,
check whether it contains the correct codes, and
check whether mod_rewrite is present.

If all checks succeed, Joomla removes the index.php.

Alternatively, Joomla could rename the htaccess.txt file automatically. As an extra failsafe, it could do a HTTP request against the frontend, and revert the changes if a 500 error is returned.

In a third approach, the .htaccess file could wrap the rewrite codes inside <IfModule mod_rewrite> ... </IfModule>.This automatic handling of htaccess might be a bit too risky, because depending on apache config, it can crash your frontend. Further testing and brainstorming is required.

Conclusion

By keeping an open mind and coming up with creative ways, I'm sure it's possible to remove half the options in Joomla, in the configuration as well as all core and 3PD extensions. Joomla can be smarter than the humans using it, by analyzing it's environment and making informed decisions. We need to step down from the idea that having more buttons means that the software is better.

So what do you think? Which options or buttons would you drop from J!1.6?

Deconstructing Joomla 1.6 SEF Settings

2008-11-25T00:34:00.014+01:00

Most people don't read manuals. All we can do is make sure our applications are easy and intuitive for everybody. Joomla does pretty well in that area, hence it's success, but the work is never done. And many third party developers seem to confuse 'options' with 'features', and 'configurability' with 'power'.

When working on Nooku, we constantly ask ourselves: "Do we really want the user to make a decision here? Can the system decide this without user interaction?" For each configuration option, users will need to understand

what it does,
how it will affect their site, and
whether that is a good thing or not.

To illustrate the process of making an application easier, let's do a small case study of the SEF feature that is in J!1.5. There are three Yes/No options in the Global Configuration:

	Option	Tooltip message
1.	Search Engine Friendly URLs	Select whether or not the URLs are optimised for Search Engines
2.	Add suffix to URLs	If yes, the system will add a suffix to the URL based on the document type
3.	Use Apache mod_rewrite	Select to use the Apache Rewrite Module to catch URLs that meet specific conditions and rewrite them as directed
		Warning: Apache users only! Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess before activating.

Even though a user knows what a search engine is, that doesn't mean he knows what search engine optimization is. The user might interpret it as "Optimizing the search box in my Joomla site". Let's look at the options again. Concepts that all users can be expected to understand are green, technical terms are red, and orange is in between.

	Option	Tooltip message
1.	Search Engine Friendly URLs	Select whether or not the URLs are optimised for Search Engines
2.	Add suffix to URLs	If yes, the system will add a suffix to the URL based on the document type
3.	Use Apache mod_rewrite	Select to use the Apache Rewrite Module to catch URLs that meet specific conditions and rewrite them as directed
		Warning: Apache users only! Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess before activating.

For a newbie, each red block is a question that needs to be answered before he can make a decision. "What is Apache?", "What is a document type?",... And even a professional CMS integrator, who's testing different solutions and quickly wants to assess if Joomla fits his purposes, will want to answer as little questions as possible.

In part 2 we have a look at how we can make this easier. And for everybody who's in web design or development, read "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug.

Solution for the Developers Challenge

2008-11-23T18:37:00.008+01:00

(Last week I posted a little challenge for PHP developers. You might want to give it a try for yourself before reading the solution below.)

I received about 15 e-mails. Most of them were a variation of the same theme: get the id's from the database, and update each row -- which usually meant having the update query inside a foreach loop. To limit the number of queries,some people worked out a way to only update the rows that actually needed updating. One person used a stored procedure in MySql, which was then called from the function.

The winners

These people sent in the best solution (ordered!):

Richard Greset
Thomas Kahl
Shayne Bartlett

They win eternal Joomla glory, and a spot in Open Source Heaven (which is just as good as regular heaven, but there's no entrance fee and you get to make your own changes!)

The solution

My solution only requires a single query:

SET @order = 0;
UPDATE jos_products SET ordering = (@order := @order + 1) ORDER BY ordering ASC;

Setting the variable in the first line obviously doesn't count as a query. The intent should be very clear: the rows are ordered, and each row get's a new value. The winners had some small variations, but the way it's written above is the one that's most readable. To see the solution as a Joomla method, download the attached zip. Of course, if you have a better solution, let's us know.

PHP's little brother

The reason for this little challenge, was to get an idea of what MySQL features people actually know how to use. Joomla 1.5, nor most of the code from 3PD extensions I've seen, make full use of MySQL. That's a pity, because there is plenty of opportunity there to make your code faster, and more stable. There are of course the historical reasons: Joomla 1.5 still has to run on MySQL 4. But I believe many people regard MySQL as PHP's little brother: you drag it along because you have to, but you don't really know it all that well.

Blast from the past

2008-11-23T07:57:00.005+01:00

Past October I was invited by DOP, one of our Nooku partners for a friendly 'Clash of the Titans', aka Drupal vs Joomla. The Drupal project was represented by Bert Boerland, Drupal evangelist and a personal friend.

Mathias already wrote about this little get together a few weeks ago. One of the things that came up during my talk was the presentation that I gave about Joomla at the second DrupalCon in Amsterdam in 2005. A historical event, it was in Amsterdam that Dries gave his first State of Drupal talk... I promised Bert I would try to dig up the slides of my presentation. Took me a while but here they are ...

This is probably the first public presentation that was given about Joomla, only a mere 2 months after it's birth. Looking back at this 3 years later, all I can say is that things have changed quite a lot. Some goals mentioned where met, others are still being worked on, others will never happen. I will try to look back some of the things mentioned in this presentation in a next post. Stay tuned.

Follow us on twitter

2008-11-22T06:08:00.005+01:00

If you just can't get enough of us here, we've also been broadcasting out into the Twittersphere with our Joomlatools account.

If you're not in the know, Twitter is a microblogging service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite people (hopefully us) on multiple networks and devices. We will be twitting about interesting stuff we are reading on the web and writing on our blog and offcourse keep you updated on what is happening in the Joomlatools HQ. Feel free to @ us with shoutouts and questions!

Joomla Developers Challenge

2008-11-15T11:50:00.005+01:00

Who's up for a little challenge? Everyone is invited to join in, even if you're a beginning php developer. We're going to tackle a simple problem. The winner gets eternal Joomla stardom!

The Problem

Imagine a simple e-commerce system. The shop owner can manage products, and show them on the front page. The owner wants to able to give some products more prominence, by ordering the list. After a while, because of all the products being added, removed and reordered, the database table becomes messy.

The Challenge

This is the table:

CREATE TABLE `jos_products` (
`id` SERIAL,
`name` VARCHAR( 100 ) NOT NULL ,
`ordering` INT NOT NULL
);

The table might look a little like this:

+----+------------+----------+
| id | name       | ordering |
+----+------------+----------+
|  6 | Chocolate  |       25 |
|  8 | Beer       |        2 |
| 19 | Cookies    |       19 |
| 21 | Lemonade   |        8 |
+----+------------+----------+

We want the 'ordering' column to be sequential, like this:

+----+------------+----------+
| id | name       | ordering |
+----+------------+----------+
|  6 | Chocolate  |        4 |
|  8 | Beer       |        1 |
| 19 | Cookies    |        3 |
| 21 | Lemonade   |        2 |
+----+------------+----------+

Your job is to write a bit of code to clean up the mess.

The rules

To win, your code should be short, elegant, and performant, with as little queries as possible. Obviously, your code should use the Joomla framework. PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5 are assumed. All we need is the actual code to fix the table, not the complete component. So your submission should look like this:

function cleanup_ordering() {
$db = JFactory::getDBO();
/* your code here */
}

Please don't go hunting the net for ready made solutions, that would kill the fun. The code should be your own work. Don't post your submissions here, but mail them to mathias {AT} joomlatools {DOT} eu.

I will post my own solution when the contest is over. This will serve as the proof:

echo md5(file_get_contents('solution.php'));
// Hash of my solution: d5dc5903a8d57ea28af5c618ec92418e

Johan Janssens recognised as CMS "Most Valued Person"

2008-10-27T16:29:00.011+01:00

I'm sure Packt Publishing needs no introduction. They published nine books on Joomla so far, donate portions of their sales back to Joomla, and organize yearly open source awards. Joomla has taken home a bunch of these awards in the past (is anyone keeping track?). This week the 2008 winners will be announced.

Joomla 1.5's Lead Architect

This year, a new category was added: "Open Source CMS Most Valued Person". I'm pleased to announce that our own Johan Janssens was selected for his work on Joomla by his community peers. Johan is one of the co-founders of Joomla, and has led the development of Joomla 1.5. Thanks to his efforts, Joomla has moved away from the spaghetti code it inherited from Mambo, and now has a super-flexible, object-oriented framework.

With almost 3500 commits (aka code changes or additions in the code repository), Johan has written more Joomla than anyone else, and it's gonna take a while before anyone catches up. He's also a top 10 poster in the official Joomla forums, spoke at numerous events, helped set up structures like the working groups and OSM, and led the development working group

That's why I'm extremely proud to be working alongside Johan on Nooku. He always has great ideas, knows more about software architecture than anyone I've ever met, and he's always happy to share his knowledge.

It's just the beginning

What can you expect from Johan in the future? Let me just say this: if you paid close attention, you already figured out that Nooku is not going to be 'just' a multilingual extension for Joomla, and it's even going to be very useful for mono-lingual sites. You've come to expect great things from Johan, and we're not settling for anything less. Stick around for some surprises about the upcoming Nooku 0.6.

Hungarian Joomladay 2008 : Impressions

2008-10-16T12:26:00.008+02:00

Last weekend I was invited by the Hungarian community for their second Joomladay. In 2007 I already had the pleasure to be at their first event in the role of Joomla! project manager, back then I gave one of my now almost famous 'Joomla! To Infinity and Beyond' talks. People must have liked it because this year they asked me to give not one but two presentations ! One about search engine optimization for Joomla! 1.5 and one about Nooku, the multi-lingual component we are working on.

In my presentation about SEO I tried to explain that search engine optimization isn't black magic. It's fairly trivial and something everybody can do it just takes time and effort. I explained a bit how keyword targeting works and used Nooku.org as an example. I also explained why so called SEF extensions are not needed anymore with Joomla! 1.5 and why they can do more damage then good. But that's a topic for another blog post.

At the end of the day and to my surprise I received a life time honorary membership of the Hungarian User Association as an appreciation for my help with starting up the Hungarian association and setting up their new community at joomla.org.hu.

Finally, a big thanks goes to Tibor, Annamari, and Tamás who I'm proud to call my friends, for the invitation and for the great hospitality. You guys did an excellent job organizing your second Joomladay. I'm already looking forward to next year.

Pictures of the event can be found on flickr and for our Hungarian readers : a full write-up of the Joomladay can be found on the Hungarian PC World Online site.

More about Joomla 1.0 end-of-life

2008-10-04T19:19:00.013+02:00

A commenter on Johan's post about Joomla 1.0's end-of-life wrote:

"Also its the old argument, why upgrade if its working fine? Why move to 1.5 when 1.0 is working just fine for me and my users? Why move to Vista if XP is working just fine for me and my users."

I absolutely agree that you don't need to upgrade when a site is working fine and doing everything you need. However, if a security vulnerability is discovered in Joomla 1.0, and no one fixes it, you are in trouble. So it's best to upgrade to 1.5 before the expiration date of 1.0.

Software versions are never maintained ad infinitum. Some projects, like Ubuntu, have a strict end-of-life policy for each release. You always know in advance exactly how much time you have to upgrade.

Setting an end-of-life date for Joomla

Joomla hasn't set an official end-of-life date yet for 1.0 (or 1.5 for that matter). This might sound like you still have a lot of time to upgrade, but that might not be the case. Joomla is a volunteer driven open source project. It's dependent on how much people 'feel like' maintaining an older version. I doubt anyone in the project feels like doing a lot of work on 1.0 anymore, so in reality, the lifecycle could already have ended without any of us knowing it.

So that's why we feel it's important for the Joomla project to announce an official date for Joomla 1.0's end-of-life asap. It serves as a promise to the community that until this date, issues will be fixed. We propose March 6, aka 03/06/09. That leaves everyone plenty of time, and it's an easy date to remember.

It's up to the community now to speak up: do you agree, do you think it's too soon, or too late? Are you upgrading to 1.5 or not at all? This way we help the Joomla project to make an informed decision.

Joomla! 1.0 end of life

2008-09-28T23:55:00.022+02:00

At the beginning of the year I predicted that Joomla! would reach it's turning point in March 2008 based on the download statistics of joomlacode.org.

My prediction turned out to be correct, however it looked like Joomla! 1.0 wasn't going to give up the fight easily. I concluded that the further uptake for 1.5 would depend on an increase in native and stable extensions and an announcement about the end of life of Joomla! 1.0.

Over the last months the number of new native extensions has been growing rapidly, for August the extensions directory team reported that about 75% of new extensions where native Joomla! 1.5 extensions. A quick search on the extension directory shows that 30% of all component are now Joomla! 1.5 native.

People are also slowly making the switch from Joomla! 1.0 to Joomla! 1.5 only, a good example are the guys over at Yootheme. A while ago they announced they where switching their templates completely to Joomla! 1.5 a few weeks ago they also released 'teamlog' a 1.5 native project management extension and from what I have heard there are more extensions on the way.

Let's have a look at the downloads for the last months and see if we can make any new predictions.

The below graph is showing the monthly download statistics for both Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5.

Conclusions :

Joomla! 1.5 is seeing a large increase in downloads since May 2008, while downloads for 1.0 are decreasing rapidly.
Total amount of downloads are holding steady at 400k downloads a month.

What does this tell s about the uptake of Joomla! 1.5 ? For that we need to have a look at the following graph.

Conclusions :

The graph shows a steady 10% increase of 1.5 downloads in regards to 1.0 since June 2008.
The graph show the percentage share for both technologies is now at 88% for 1.5 and 12% for 1.0.

Based on this data I predict that Joomla! 1.0 will be reaching the end of it's life around the beginning of 2009. Time for the project to bite the bullet and set a date : 03/06/09, or March 6, 2009, 3 years and 6 months after the release of 1.0 seems like the perfect date to me. What do you think ?