Joomla Blogs

Sneak peak at the upcoming JBolo 3.0 dashboard

manoj_l@techjoomla.com (Manoj Londhe) — Sat, 18 May 2013 11:22:48 GMT

Checkout new dashboard for upcoming JBolo 3.0 that will be supporting group chat!

Joomla is what you make it !

parth.lawate@techjoomla.com (Parth Lawate) — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:34:44 GMT

What is Joomla ? Why Joomla ? Can Joomla do this ? These are some of the most common questions that come up in any client pitch, consultation or any non Joomla events that i speak at. The answers very much depend on the target audience & are given depending on their level of technical know how & areas of Interest.

I believe Joomla is like clay.. the end user, integrator or developer can mould it to his or her needs.

Over the years Joomla has evolved from being just a CMS to what i would like to call a Hybrid Application Development Platfrom . With a decently light core ( yes it could be lighter), a huge array of Extensions, a Powerful MVC achitechture and APIs and the ability to even extend the framework with libraries like FOF - Joomla is seriously powerful. And we are not even talking about the Joomla framework and Joomla platform yet !

From a Simple website to a Full scale cloud application, Joomla does not limit you in any way. In fact, Joomla has a facet for every type of user.

- End Users
-- Integrators
--- Extension Developers
---- Platform Developers

With what we have seen and done with Joomla to date, we believe Joomla is what you make it. There are simply no limits to what you can extend it to do.

Joomla is like Clay.. that the artist can mould into a beautiful work of art.. with imagination being the only limit !

So let your imagination fly ! Tell us what did you build with Joomla today ? Do Comment & share what you have done

Automating multiple extension translation management using the transifex client and a shell script

ashwin.date@tekdi.net (Ashwin Date) — Sat, 04 May 2013 09:24:54 GMT

We've been using transifex for more than a year now, and quite happy with the way crowd sourcing can help enrich the reach of your extensions. However updating all the resources for all the extensions was a painful task and something everyone wanted to avoid. The tx-client eases some pain by allowing easy pushes & pulls of source files & translations. However the tx-client relies on a 'config' file to be updated with all the resource slugs. With so many extensions and also with so many plugin language files getting added regularly, its a tough task to keep on updating the config file.

At Techjoomla we had almost 10 major extensions using transifex, each with 5-10 resources. To speed up things, here's a shell script that I wrote up. The script automates updation of your transifex config file. That way, everytime you need to add more resources, just pull them from your source control and run the joomlatx.sh script and your config will be updated with all the resources.

Here's a step by step tutorial on how to set up and use the script

Set up the transifex client and configure your username and password. Here are a few guides on how to do that -
https://compojoom.com/about/blog/entry/transifex-the-tutorial-for-joomla-developers
Also ensure that the language map is correctly set up, this is an important step.
Assuming you have all your repositories in /home/ashwin/SVN initialise the tx client in that folder
```
$ cd /home/ashwin/SVN
$ tx init
```
Copy the joomlatx.sh and the project-langs.txt from github into the SVN folder
https://github.com/techjoomla/Joomla-Extensions/blob/master/scripts/joomlatx.sh
https://github.com/techjoomla/Joomla-Extensions/blob/master/scripts/project-langs.txt
The project-langs.txt needs to be updated with the correct locations of your files for each transifex project. The word in the square brackets is 'slug' of your project on transifex. This is the projectname part of the URL when you visit your project page on transifex.net. The lines following are the locations where project language files are present.

Assuming english (en-GB) is your base language your repository should be set up as

myproject/trunk/admin/lang/en-GB
myproject/trunk/admin/lang/fr-FR
myproject/trunk/site/lang/en-GB
myproject/trunk/site/lang/fr-FR
In this case, you should only put the path till the /lang folder. The script will automatically pick up the default language files based on the setting in joomlatx.sh
Once this is set up simply run the script
```
$ ./joomlatx.sh
```
Note: If you have already set up resources in Transifex, then you will need to update the resource slugs in transifex according to the relevant slug names that have been created in the config file by the script. If you dont do this, you will end up with duplicate language files on Transifex.
Running the script will update your config file and map the language files to transifex resources.
Now you can simply push and pull source and translations. If there are new translations, the client automatically creates the folders and copies the files.
```
$ tx push -s
$ tx pull
```

Say no to Pirated Joomla Extensions & keep your site secure ! Download extensions only ...

parth.lawate@techjoomla.com (Parth Lawate) — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:25:16 GMT

Recently, it has come to our attention that some non paying users have downloaded non official copies of our extensions from Warez & nulled sites & have ended up getting their sites hacked. This has been reported for SocialAds, Invitex, JBolo & JGive so far. It looks like some backdoor code had been injected in the extension files before making them available for download on Warez sites.

We appeal to all users of our extensions to make sure they download their extension copies from the official site. If you have a developer who is managing your site & extension installations etc, also ensure they follow this.

Note that Techjoomla is not liable to support any non customers who download extensions from any external warez/unofficial sites/ forums. If you are using an unofficial copy, we would strongly suggest purchasing a valid subscription and install the official version available at our website http://techjoomla.com

Deploying Joomla projects using GIT

ashwin.date@tekdi.net (Ashwin Date) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:59:25 GMT

Over the years we've been using various methods to deploy websites to servers. FTP is everyone's first love and hot favourite. But when GIT came along and we started using that our VCS of choice it became increasingly evident that we can use it for deployment too. The biggest challenge here was managing the database. Because of the way new table creations and table alterations are handled in Joomla we decided to leave out table updates in the automated deployment process and chose to handle them by extension installation or manual creation. With that decided it became easy to structure and write code so that it can be deployed via a simple script.

I'm giving here an example of the deployment script for a website that relies heavily on Zoo. We also have a few other extensions but Zoo is central. A few points about our setup

The entire joomla /images folder is excluded from git. Any images that the application itself needs are stored in media or along with the template
Zoo saves its filelds and settings in .config files somewhere in the /media/zoo folder. These are excluded from git
The user generated content like images and other files are of course excluded from git
cache, log & tmp are excluded from git
configuration.php too is of course excluded

Here's the structure of the project's git repo

/code
/code/www (Contains Joomla and all extensions -- this is what gets deployed)
/code/scripts (This is where the deployment and other scripts are stored)
/database (Contains schema dump for new devs to start with)
/documentation (Release notes)

Here's what the dev team follows

All devs work on their own clone. The clone is symlinked into their docroot for ease of development
Every release is tagged within git (The deploy script needs a tag number to be specified for deployment)
If any release involves configuration changes they are handled in the form of a Release Note for that version and run at the time of deployment

Now, to perform the deployment the person doing the deloyment has to login to the server and simply run the deployment script.

$ cd /var/www && ./joomla-deploy.sh 0.8.4 0.8.3 alpha

You can download the script from here - Joomla Deploy Script

Here's what the script does in a nutshell

Accepts the deployment version, currently deployed version and environment name
Updates the server's local git copy and checks out the deployment version
Creates a folder for deployment (Eg: /var/www/alpha-0.8.4)
Moves/Copies images and other assets from the previously deployed version (Ideally these would be symlinked too, but Zoo has problems working with symlinked files, so we have to move these around everytime)
Symlinks the configuration.php
Finally, symlinks the alpha-0.8.4 to alpha so that the QA team can use the same URL for testing
Writes out the deployed version to a small .htversion file (We have a module that reads and displays this version so that the QA team knows which version to report bugs against)

The dev team is very happy with the script since deployment time has reduced to a few seconds and is pretty much error free. Also, in case of any major isses with the deployed version, its very easy to roll back to the older version by simply changing the symlink to point to the older version!

Zoo - Creating an address field element

sanjivani_p@tekdi.net (Sanjivani Patil) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:38:08 GMT

Here's a short tutorial on creating a zoo element that has multiple sub-fields. A good example for the same, which we've also used as a sample is an address field. An adress field will typically have different parts such as city, zip, state etc. I assume you have already gone through the zoo documentation on creating a new custom element - http://www.yootheme.com/zoo/documentation/developers/create-a-custom-element

Step 1: The xml file
create the media/zoo/applications/<YOUR APPLICATION>/elements/address/address.xml file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<element type="address" group="mylist">
    <name>Address</name>
    <author>Tekdi</author>
    <creationDate>Feb 2013</creationDate>
    <copyright>Copyright (C) tekdi</copyright>
    <authorEmail></authorEmail>
    <authorUrl>http://www.tekdi.net</authorUrl>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
    <description>Repeateble city,country and state fields</description>
</element>

Step 2: The php file
create this file: media/zoo/applications/<YOUR APPLICATION>/elements/address/address.php

<?php
// no direct access
defined('_JEXEC') or die('Restricted access');
// register ElementRepeatable class
App::getInstance('zoo')->loader->register('ElementRepeatable', 'elements:repeatable/repeatable.php');
class ElementAddress extends ElementRepeatable implements iRepeatSubmittable {
    
    protected function _hasValue($params = array()) {
        $value = $this->get('value');
        return $this->_containsEmail($value);
    }
    public function getText() {
        $text = $this->get('value', '');
        return empty($text) ? $this->get('value', '') : $text;
    }
    
    protected function _edit(){
        return $this->_editForm();
    }
    public function _renderSubmission($params = array()) {
        return $this->_editForm($params->get('trusted_mode'));
    }
    protected function _editForm($trusted_mode = true) {
        if ($layout = $this->getLayout('edit.php')) {
            return $this->renderLayout($layout,
                array('trusted_mode' => $trusted_mode
                )
            );
        }
    }
    public function _validateSubmission($value, $params) {
        $values    = $value;
        $validator = $this->app->validator->create('string', array('required' => false));
        $value      = $validator->clean($values->get('value'));
        $country   = $validator->clean($values->get('country'));
        $state      = $validator->clean($values->get('state'));
        return compact( 'value', 'country', 'state');
    }
}

Step 3: Another php file
create this file: media/zoo/applications/<YOUR APPLICATION>/elements/address/tmpl/edit.php

<?php
// no direct access
defined('_JEXEC') or die('Restricted access');
?>
<div>
    <?php echo $this->app->html->_('control.text', $this->getControlName('value'), $this->get('value'), 'size="60" title="'.JText::_('value').'" placeholder="'.JText::_('value').'"'); ?>        
            
    <?php echo $this->app->html->_('control.text', $this->getControlName('country'), $this->get('country'), 'size="60" title="'.JText::_('country').'" placeholder="'.JText::_('country').'"'); ?>
            
    <?php echo $this->app->html->_('control.text', $this->getControlName('state'), $this->get('state'), 'size="60" title="'.JText::_('state').'" placeholder="'.JText::_('state').'"'); ?>
        
</div>

J!Bolo 3.0 beta 1 is here for Testing & its free to download !

manoj_l@techjoomla.com (Manoj Londhe) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:32:00 GMT

JBolo Beta 1 with Group Chat is here ! This version brings most awaited group chat feature to current JBolo. This blog will give you a quick overview of what to expect from JBolo 3.0 beta release. There's this & plenty more under the hood including a API based architecture which will allow us to release mobile apps for J!Bolo in the near future.

Group-chat Finally ! And a new improved Architecture

JBolo 3.0 beta 1 is almost completely re-wrtten, based on a scalable architecture for a complete chatting system. The major feature of this version will be support for group chat. As you can see in the screen shot below - the first chatwindow is a groupchatwindow where three users are chatting and the other chat window is on-to-one chat window.

It's damn easy to add other users to the current chat or current group chat, the same way as you do it in gmail chat!

Better chat history view !

JBolo 3.0 beta 1 will be having a bootstrapped chat-history view. You can open the chat history right from the current chat window. Chat history for one-to-one chat and group chat can be opened from respective chat windows.

Better file sending with image previews !

Now, you can preview the images you select before you upload. We are now using a better file uploader that looks like as shown in screenshot below.

What's more ?

JBolo 3.0 beta 1 will be having a theme switcher module, which will let users have a control over what theme they want to use. It will be pre packed with two themes that will match the gmail.com and facebook.com chat styles.

Free Download, Test & Discuss

The Beta is free to download. Please go to the forum link below to see instructions on how to test & get the download.

http://techjoomla.com/forums-community-support/question/jbolo-3-0-beta-1-is-here-for-testing-testing-reporting-instructions.html

SocialAds 2.9 Beta - Campaigns, Budgeting & More !

parth.lawate@techjoomla.com (Parth Lawate) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 07:36:05 GMT

We are pleased to announce that SocialAds 2.9 has entered Beta ! This version brings some pretty major features to the advertising scene in Joomla. This blog will give you a quick overview of what to expect. Note that this is a beta release & should only be used for testing & not on Production sites !

A Whole New Charging Option with Campaigns & Budgeting !

SocialAds 2.9 beta brings a whole new Charging Model. With this new model, SocialAds will now let you make a Pre payment to add balance to your account, then create Campaigns, set budgets & create Ads against them without having to pay & checkout for every Ad. Google Ads, Facebook & LinkedIn Ads already work on this model.

Switching to this model is optional. If you prefer to use the Pay & Checkout per Ad model, you can keep using this same. If you wish to switch, we have provided a quick migration tool that will convert your user's existing ad balances to the new model on a prorata basis.

Ad Balance & Billing

Once you are on this model, the users can use a 'Add Balance' process to prepay funds to their account on your site. A Nice looking Ad Billing view shows a history of all transactions as well as full details of how its being spent.

Campaigns & Budgets

The user can create campaigns & set a Daily budget against the campaign. Ads will be created against campaigns. SocialAds will show Ads till the daily budget is exhausted.

Beautiful with Bootstrap !

We have completely revamped the front end views of SocialAds & added some awesome Bootstrap magic. Now you don't have to wait for 3.0 to get a beautiful interface for SocialAds ! P.S. SocialAds will be 3.0 compatible by March end in the version 3.0 .

100+ Bug fixes & many Feature improvements

This version of SocialAds as of now has fixed 132 Bugs & added 6 features including the features mentioned above.

Help Us Beta Test & Give us Feedback

In order to do more inclusive development, we try & get our subscribers involved whenever possible in the planning & development process. This is your chance to help us test the beta release & also give valuable feedback on improving it. Jump on to our Beta testers Discussion forum. You can find documentation on how to setup SocialAds Beta 2.9 with Campaigns & Budgets here.

Read on for the full changelog

How to use two layouts from same view for two submenus

manoj_l@techjoomla.com (Manoj Londhe) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:14:56 GMT

Have you ever came across a situation, when working on a joomla component- you need two sub-menus to be shown in admin backend which belong to same view and different layouts?

If yes, then you must have noiced that this does not work as expected.

Here's the solution for the same.

Suppose there are two submenus - this is the PHP code to add two submenus -

$reports=true;
JSubMenuHelper::addEntry(JText::_('COM_JGIVE_REPORTS'),'index.php?option=com_jgive&view=reports&layout=default',$reports);
JSubMenuHelper::addEntry(JText::_('COM_JGIVE_PAYOUT_REPORTS'),'index.php?option=com_jgive&view=reports&layout=payouts',$reports);

As you can see the 'view' for 2 submenus is same and 'layouts' are different

index.php?option=com_jgive&view=reports&layout=default

index.php?option=com_jgive&view=reports&layout=payouts

So when you browse to one of above mentioned views - you will see both submenus as active as shown in image below -

TO fix this you will need to add some jquery code to not show other submenu as active.

FILE - view=reports&layout=default

$document=JFactory::getDocument();
//override active menu class to remove active class from other submenu
$menuCssOverrideJs="$(document).ready(function()
{
$('ul>li> a[href$=\"index.php?option=com_jgive&view=reports&layout=payouts\"]:last').removeClass('active');
});";
$document->addScriptDeclaration($menuCssOverrideJs);

FILE - view=reports&layout=payouts

$document=JFactory::getDocument();
//override active menu class to remove active class from other submenu
$menuCssOverrideJs="$(document).ready(function(){
$('ul>li> a[href$=\"index.php?option=com_jgive&view=reports&layout=default\"]:last').removeClass('active');
});";
$document->addScriptDeclaration($menuCssOverrideJs);

After adding above code in those two layouts you will see that only the current submenu is shown as active.

It works well on joomla 2.5.x. :)