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Joomla! goes iPhone

Written by Wolfgang Disch Tuesday, 17 November 2009 11:26

The way a website should look and behave in a mobile device is significantly different than how it does on a PC display. According to the principle "Write Once, Publish Everywhere" we don’t want to force users to maintain multiple copies of every page. That would be disgustingly inefficient, particulary for a site based on Joomla!

I want to present you a proposal which is based on a template and on a module which shows arcticles from your Joomla! website.

The template itself is made up of iPhone-optimized code including the iUI-Library of Joe Hewitt.This library helps the website to emulate a native iPhone App by using Javascript and CSS. Its goal is simply to turn ordinary standards-based HTML into a polished, usable interface that maps to iPhone interface conventions. You know from standard Apps the sliding pages, a header with Back-button and a menu, which is able to reload items using AJAX.

The big advantage is to load several iPhone pages at the same time so you have no delay when you navigate from page to page. This gives you a better useability especially when you are using EDGE connections. With not more than 16k the template is lightweight and fast.

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Native e-commerce coming to a Joomla! near you!

Written by Arno Zijlstra Saturday, 14 November 2009 16:35

Until now there hasn't been a real effort to create a Joomla! 1.5 native e-commerce platform but that's about to change. While there is an enormous need for such a system it is also a huge task to build. E-commerce is something different than running a website presenting content, it involves things like inventory and catalog management, customer management, payment handling and strong analytics options.

I've been involved in serious e-commerce quite a bit at a company that ran a whole portfolio of large stores with many millions of revenue and have learned that e-commerce isn't just simply putting some products online and wait for customers to come by. E-commerce is a very active task and requires dedication and active marketing efforts to get the most out of your sales process. An important part of this overall active store management are the tools you have available to run your store, the e-commerce platform.

Dioscouri is a well established name in the Joomla! world for delivering great products and with those products a very solid support process. They've taken up the task to build the first Joomla! native full featured e-commerce platform and I've been talking to Rafael and Vika who lead Dioscouri about this platform extensively and I'm very exited about it.

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Refactoring your code to Fluent Interface

Written by Wilco Jansen Friday, 06 November 2009 23:45

With the introduction of chaining methods together in PHP 5 we now have the opportunity to implement Fluent Interfaces in PHP which opens up an interesting way of writing more readable and smaller code.

Fluent Interfaces are not a new programming construct, they provide us with the ability to directly de-reference an object, PHP developers can build objects using fluent interfaces.

On the first look this might look like abracadabra if you are totally new to the new buzzword "Fluent Interfaces". Fluent interfaces are best described as way of chaining methods of an object together. By having a method return a reference to the object itself, return $this; you chain methods together like this:

$this->methodOne()->methodTwo()->methodThree();

The point of using fluent interfaces is simple; to make your code easier to read (and in the end also easier to maintain). My interest has been triggered by the articles Júlio Pontes has been posting on the All Together As A Whole website. A community initiative to gather community developers together. A full list of the articles written by Júlio can be found at the end of this article.

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eZ Publish News

Written by Robin Muilwijk Monday, 02 November 2009 20:00

Book Review
Just the other day I received my review copy of a new book titled "eZ Publish 4: Enterprise Web Sites Step-by-Step". Packt Publishing contacted me a few weeks ago about this upcoming release and asked me to review this book. I'll hope to read through it in one or two weeks and I will post my review on our blog here.

eZ Publish Community Portal
I just read on twitter that the new Community Portal of eZ Publish is online. It looks promising, giving the Community a more prominant place in there site structure. Congrats to eZ Publish with the launch.

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The Internet turns 40

Written by Wilco Jansen Friday, 30 October 2009 08:31

It was exactly forty years ago on this Friday that the first link on Arpanet was created. On 29 october 1969 at half past ten in the evening a connection was made between the university of Los Angeles and Stanford. The first connection in the Netherlands was there at October 30. ARPANET, a project of the U.S. defense research organization Arpa, was the mainstay of the Internet as we know it today.

Arpanet was obviously not the only important link in the development of the Internet: tcp / ip, Cyclades and the breakdown of Arpanet in a military research arm and also contributed to much. The www was of great importance, this application of the Internet - by many as a synonym for 'Internet' is used - made sure that the Internet could be rapidly popular among 'ordinary' users.

Check out the slideshow on the Guardian website if you are interested in a quick overview of the development of the Internet. No doubt that the ideas of Tim Berner Lee made the web available for the general public, read his original proposal and be amazed how this led to the Internet as we know it.

Happy birthday Internet!

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How to download the latest version of Joomla 1.6

Written by Wilco Jansen Friday, 16 October 2009 22:00

At the current download page of Joomla you will not find a nightly build download option as it was available earlier on (1.0 and early 1.5 development). There are a lot of people who are eager to see the current state of 1.6 and would like to download a development version. In this article I will explain how you can get a copy of the latest development version.

Before we show the tools that can make it happen, I would like to explain a bit more on how the Joomla codebase is maintained. The Joomla development team is storing changes to the code into a software versioning system called Subversion. The code is stored in a so called commit, saying no more that the changes that de developer has made locally are uploaded to a central repository. That repository can be access by a web browser or tools that have been build for easy maintenance of the software. It is possible to go back to every state of the development by reverting versions since every change is stored in this central repository.

When an official release is build a copy is extracted from this software repository and from that extract the compressed files are generated that you then can download. For official releases this process is automated, but if you are interested in the last version of the code you can manually export the data from the repository. What I normally do in such a situation is export the data into the webfolder of my development system, in my case that is '/var/www'.

It is actually pretty straight forward, let me give an example of a command line export on Ubuntu (subversion client is installed of course).

cd /var/www
svn export http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/ --username anonymous
Authentication realm: <http://joomlacode.org:80> Document repository
Password for 'anonymous':

As you can see we do a checkout from the 1.6 trunk location (http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/) and use anonymous access to retrieve the repository. There are several different clients available that can read the subversion repository on a variety of platforms (Windows, Linux, MAC). Under windows you can use for example Turtoise SVN, all you then need to do is to right-click on a folder in the explorer en you can select the export option. Obviously it would be the easiest way if the daily build option was re-introduced on joomla.org...

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