Please add your pictures and mobile phone shots to flickr and tag them with Joomla!DayFI2006 - check out the pictures here.

The a bit shy Finish people talked a lot about the different ideas and solutions. The release of Joomla! 1.5 was highly appriciated. Specially the feature of a multilingual backend is what the people are waiting for. Most of the companies working with Joomla! currently are migrating their old sites to the latest versions. The biggest issue at this point is training and the sales force.

The question: “What do you think is the biggest challange to make Joomla! the top #1 CMS used in Finland?” was answered with a simple word: “Sales-Force”. There are plenty of companies which have already heared about Joomla! and want to use Joomla! for their sites, however there are companies, desingers and programmers missing that implement those sites.

I really appriciated the trip and have to thank the whole team of Joomla!Portal FI for the wonderful organization. A special thank you to Markku who sponsored my expenses for this trip. I’m definitly looking forward seeing the next annoucement of Joomla!Day FI 2007 soon.

Joomla!, Joomla!Day, Finland, Helsinki

Recently Updated Extensions

One of the most requested features for JED has now been implemented! Recently Updated Extensions will now show the latest 20 updates to extensions.

Improved review system

Up until now, reviews were listed by creation date. Newest reviews were shown first. A person can now vote whether a review is helpful or not. Listings are now based on the usefulness of a review. The rating is done through an AJAX script, no screen updates are necessary after reviewing. To use this functionality, you need to log in with your JED account.

Developer replies

Developers can now reply to a review which will appear right below the review. JED editors can review these replies before publishing them. Besides replying, a report function is available for everyone to report a review.

Favorites

Do you like certain extensions? Add them to your favourites! Other users will be able to browse your favourites to discover more extensions.

Linked reviewer name

By clicking on the name above a review, you will be taken to a new page which shows all extensions, reviews and favorites by the reviewer.

Improved extension ordering

Extensions were previously ordered by the total number of votes. Now they’re ordered by the following condition:

To put it simply, once an extension has reach the minimum 5 votes, it will be ordered according to the rating and the number of votes.

After we actually launched the events forums and started spreding the idea of Joomla!Days more and more communities are picking up the idea. It is really great to meet the people around the world using Joomla! and it is always very intersting to see their different views and requirements.

Tomorrow I’ll be meeting the Finish Joomla! community in Helsinki. Beside the the very interesting speaches which will be held druing the day I’m looking forward meeting the people and see what they think about the upcomming versions of Joomla!.

Stay tuned for the latest news and pictures soon, here on this spot.

Joomla!, Joomla!Day, Finnland

I think we are
Here’s how I reached this conclusion:

This week we welcomed a new international community to our forum. The new Latvian Forum moderator, zuze was one of only a handful of female moderators. Also, this week, another new female moderator joined us, Wizzie who you will run in to (in a good way hopefully) in the main ‘Top’ section.

All this got me thinking, so I took a look at the Statistic Center on our forum, and noted something interesting. The ratio of male to female has been reducing. About 6 months ago, it was 12:1, and now it is down to 10:1 (approx). I think it is great, and shows the universal appeal and reach that Joomla has.

In other news:
You may have noticed the new Joomla! Working Group Credits forum. Soon we will be listing (if WG members choose to be) all the Joomla Workgroup participants. We think is it about time we gave credit to so many of the hard working people who help to make Joomla what it is today.

Coming up:
More and more work is being done on our FAQ’s and soon we plan to get these moved to the help site. We hope this will prove to further enhance the hard work being done by the Documentation Workgroup.

Statistics are not everything, however Joomla continues to climb in rank according to Alexa. We are already in the top 500, and as of today at 449 of the top 500 websites worldwide. See this link. I predict we will see Joomla up near 400 in the next few months if this growth continues.

Finally, my quote of the week, which I now have in my signature: “Amateurs hope, professionals work.” - Garson Kanin

See you all somewhere in the Joomlasphere!

After a shorter period of downtime, caused by some users’ abuse, Joomla! demo sites are back online.

To reduce the excessive spam we introduced a mandatory registration and email account confirmation in order to edit the demo site. Also, the sites are regularly refreshed every hour as usual. If the need arises, we will consider other measures like tracking down and banning the abusers.

Once again we ask our users not to abuse the privilege of the online Joomla! demo and don’t post spam weblinks, porn, foul language etc. Also, try not to ruin for others by deliberately removing all articles, menu links etc. from the demo site.

Thank you!

Some Joomla! statistics to finish of october, the month Joomla! beta 1.5 came to be. We don’t have the exact download numbers of Joomla! 1.5 beta, but we do have some other information. Joomla! Forge has been the depository for lots of nice projects, and the download numbers on Forge still increase every month. At the beginning of the year, the bandwidth spent on Joomla! Forge was about 600 GB per month. This amount has been rising as time progressed. For the month october, we reached the highest total since starting. Joomla! Forge alone was enough for 1,8 TB of bandwidth. Somehow we don’t think this amount will lessen in the coming months.

As we are talking statistics, also an update for the rest of the Joomla! websites. The Joomla! Extensions Directory and the Forum are now on one server. These two manage to burn away 1,5 TB per month, also still growing each month. The rest of the Joomla! sites, www.joomla.org, help.joomla.org, and dev.joomla.org are on a second server. Surprisingly, these sites are good for 1 TB in the month october. In total, this means that 4,3 TB of bandwidth has been spent by all people who are interested in Joomla! one way or the other.

A last small piece of information. Did you know that more than 51 percent of all people visiting www.joomla.org use the Firefox browser?

Poor Alex?just woke up at 4:00 am to drop me of on Munich Airport. It is 5:40 now, currently sitting on the Airport and have some time spare to do some blogging. It was an exciting week for Joomla! We won the open source awards, and were at two places in Europe with members of the core-team. On Friday we were in Munich at the open-source plaza at the Systems 2006 event along with some community members.

Past week it was very busy on the Systems 2006 event, with a top day on Tuesday, Marko literally braking down?he really needs to take some rest! On the last day of this event I was on the booth. In the morning it was very busy with people getting in line to talk about Joomla! The fact that a lot of companies show real interest in Joomla! or already have moved toward it was very interesting to me. Later on the day it was less busy, but busy enough that I only had time to do a small lunch for about 25 minutes.

Talking to all visitors was exciting, most people who know Joomla! are very positive about Joomla! There even were persons who wanted to give us money for the effort we are doing, we simply pointed them towards the donate button on our site. Within the discussions I noticed some topics were standard, and those I want to share in this blog.

• When is Joomla! 1.5 final released? Funny that Alex and I answered this question slightly different, but in basics we are saying the same. We currently work on two releases of Joomla! and that is a lot of work for us at the moment. Almost all artifacts for Joomla! 1.0.12 are assigned, and the moment we fix all is close. The Quality and Testing workgroup, along with the 1.0 development team is working their asses off to get this release out. The date for the final of Joomla! 1.5 is not set, and the easiest answer we can give is; we release it when it is ready. This is completely true, but within the 1.5 development team we try to get the job done this year. We are not sure we can make it, but we will try hard.
• Is ACL in Joomla! 1.5 and if not, when does ACL come to Joomla? We are fully aware of the needs of ACL. I did a lot of explaining why we did not change this in Joomla! 1.5. The main reason is that one of the most important design goals of 1.5 was keeping backward compatability, even when we do a complete refactoring of the framework?in fact we did a complete ground-up rebuild of the framework. Almost all research work on full ACL has been done in the Summer Of Code and will be included in Joomla! 2.0. We have done some research on a simple ACL and are considering including this in Joomla! 1.6. It is too early to talk about the details of 1.6 here, currently we try to focus on 1.0.12 and 1.5.
• Are there any examples of implementations of Joomla? This indeed is a question for people new to Joomla! but also existing users ask this question a lot. Questions about hardware ?and software requirements were common. To help community users with this, I will contact our Marketing and Media workgroup if the can work out a section describing some show-cases, this will certainly help explaining what is needed for a Joomla! website, even if it is a personal blog or a high traffic website.
• Were can I find more information? The questions here differ. We have new community members who are looking for general information. I just pointed them to the website we have, and of course the forum were you can seek information or ask help. On the other hand developers and site admins asked were they could find specific documentation. For the admins I point to the help site, the just released 1.0.11 documentation is a great resource! Developers mostly ask for documentation on the Joomla! 1.5 framework. Parts of this is ready and available on the development section (and wiki), but I explained we need to do some additional documentation of the framework upcomming weeks, we simply have been to busy with the beta to do some proper work on this area.

Looking back we are very excited about the contacts we had this week. Already looking forward to the upcoming Dutch Joomla!day on 8/9 December in Den Bosch were I will be around again and hope to talk to all of you.

Templates have always been one of Joomla!’s strengths. The vast number of free and commercial templates designed for Joomla! 1.0 are the best proof of the success of the Joomla! template system. After beta release we received allot of questions on the forums about the template system changes in Joomla! 1.5 beta.

While the beta is only intended for feedback and testing purposes we realize designers need more information to truly test the template changes. On the forums designers have been telling us we can’t expect them to go and read the code to understand the new system. They are absolutely right !

In the coming week I will be blogging about the different changes we made. I’ll try to answer the many questions people have been posting on the forums. I will also try to explain why certain changes have been made. The information will be a bit technical from time to time but I believe it’s important you not only understand the ‘how’ but also the ‘why’.

Time to dive in …

Backwards compatibility with 1.0

Before we dive into the real stuff let’s talk about backwards compatibility. The new system has been designed to be fully backwards compatible with Joomla! 1.0. If you are installing a Joomla! 1.0 template make sure you turn on the ‘legacy mode’ in the server tab in global configuration. This layer loads all the 1.0 functionality that has been deprecated in 1.5.

Beware of the Menu Modules parameter settings compared to the default 1.0.x settings. In this first beta, they are displayed as list and that breaks menus in solarflare for example. Change to Vertical or Horizontal when needed. This could change in beta 2.

A _menu suffix has been added per default to the menu modules parameters. This will be taken off to maintain backward compatibility in the next beta release.

What is new in 1.5 ?

The changes to the template system in Joomla! 1.5 can be divided into two categories. First of all there are changes to the way things where done in Joomla! 1.0, for example the new way modules are loaded, and second there are also a bunch of extra features, like template parameters, … a quick overview :

1. Changes to the old ways

mosCountMoules

The mosCountModules function has been replaced by the $this->countModules function and support for conditions has been added. This allows designers to easily count the total number of modules in multiple template positions in just one line of code, for example $this->countModules(’user1 + user2′); which will return the total number of modules in position user1 and user2.

Including output generated by the core

In Joomla! 1.0 you could use different functions to include the output generated by the core. These functions have all been replaced by the < jdoc :include ... /> element. For example modules in a certain position can be included using < jdoc :include type="modules" name="left" />

Loading the editor

In Joomla! 1.0 you needed to load the editor yourself in your templates. This is not needed anymore. When the system renders the head of your template it will decide if the editor needs to be included or not.

2. New features

Template parameters

Template parameters can be used to let administrators control the template structure. They work much in the same way as module parameters. A template designer can define extra template settings in the templates xml file and the site administrator can adjust them in the template manager. For example, administrators could switch color schemes, choose between a 2 or 3 column layout … or set the minimum width of the template.

Template Overrides

Templates can override the default output of the core, for example you could easily override the way an article is rendered and change the table output to divs. Or you can change a class or id to your liking. Pagination rendering and module styles can also be extended.

Support for multiple css files

The template manager supports multiple css files so you don’t need to put all your css into one file. We also changed the naming of the master css file to template.css instead of template_css.css and added support for a special editor.css file that gets loaded by the wysiwyg editor in the administrator.

Template architecture in 1.5

For Joomla! 1.5 we wanted to fully separate the logic from the output. A template designer shouldn’t be restricted to the hardcoded output in the core, he should be able to override all the html generated by the modules and components to suit his needs.

To allow this kind of functionality Joomla! 1.5 implements a solution called a ‘template view‘ using a model-view-controller or MVC pattern. The implementation of this pattern is part of the new Joomla! Framework. Components and modules developed using this new API (application programming interface) can be automatically overridden by template designers.

The Joomla! 1.5 architecture makes a difference between two types of templates, the site templates and the extension templates. A site template defines the look and feel of your website while an extension template defines how a certain component or module gets rendered. The extension templates can be overridden in a site template.

Before we start building a first real world example of a 1.5 template I feel it’s important to explain the ‘template view’ approach a bit more in detail. The following part might be a bit technical, try to stick with me. It will hopefully give you a better understanding about templates, template engines and why things in Joomla! 1.5 are the way they are.

Template views

A Template View uses a template to implement the View portion of the Model View Controller pattern. A template is a document typically HTML with embedded markers which are replaced, manipulated, or evaluated via a template engine API to produce an output document. The purpose of a template is to isolate the HTML from the programming language code in a web application. There are several reasons for such a separation.

HTML Design and Application Programming are different roles on a web application development team, often performed by different people and at different points in time. Separating the HTML from the code gives each person their own file to work on.

When HTML was designed, it was never intended to be directly edited. Separating HTML from programming code allows the large body of WYSIWYG HTML editors to be used to edit template documents.

Simply separating HTML from programming code goes a long way toward isolating the presentation layer of an application. However, presentation logic complicates this isolation. Presentation logic consists of requirements such as ?Show active menu item in red.?

A key design decision when using Template View is how to handle presentation logic. HTML was specifically not designed to be able to handle arbitrary logic (Principle of Least Power). To be able to handle arbitrary presentation logic, one must either augment the HTML or place the logic inside the program.

This is where template engines come in …

Template engines

Template engines were designed to allow the separation of business logic from the presentation of data. Template engines solve two major problems. How to achieve this separation, and how to separate “complex” php code from the HTML. In theory this allows HTML designers with no PHP experience to modify the look of the site without having to look at any PHP code.

Template engines introduce yet another level of processing. Not only do the template files have to be included, they also have to be parsed (depending on the template system, this happens in different ways - regular expressions, str_replaces, compiling, etc.). This is why template benchmarking came to be. Since template engines use a variety of different methods of parsing, some are faster and some are slower.

So basically what we have going on here is a scripting language (PHP) written in C used for the business logic. Inside the PHP code, you have yet another pseudo-scripting language to implement the presentational logic. Some template engines offer simple variable interpolation and loops. Others offer conditionals and nested loops. Still others offer an interface into pretty much all of PHP.

While patTemplate allows strict separation of business from presentation logic, there are still some problems. Basically, it just provides an interface to PHP with new syntax. When stated like that, it seems sort of silly. Is it actually more simple to write < pattemplate :tmpl name="row" loop="10"> … than < ? foreach($rows as $row) ... ?> ? We feel it isn’t.

For Joomla! 1.5 we are advocating to use PHP code as the template language of choice to implement presentation logic. We don’t believe that the PHP code a template designer needs to learn to create his presentational logic is more complex then learning the syntax of a template engine.

Where does that leave patTemplate ?

patTemplate was originaly choosen for it’s strictness, flexibility and xml declarative syntax. More info can be found in this old thread on the Mambo forums.

The problem with patTemplate is preformance. It doesn’t offer a decent compiling mechanism. We had originaly implemented it in Mambo 4.5.3 and preformance checks showed a huge increase in the page load. The major problem with patTemplate is that it can’t compile templates into PHP code as for example Smarty can which means that a template needs to be parsed and rendered every time a page is requested.

As a result we have decided not to use patTemplate in the core any more. The patTemplate library is still included in the Joomla! 1.5 framework for backwards compatibility reasons but we are not advocating it as the way forward.

Coming next : ‘How to build a site template in 1.5′

Beside the nice weather here in Munich, we have every Day full house at our booth 441-14. I can’t remember when i had talked that much within 9 hours in the past. Very amazing is the interests of Companies in Joomla! and also how many Companies have heared about Joomla!

The presentation of the new Joomla! 1.5 Version is a full success and most comments are positive. Lot’s Companies are interested in the future of Joomla! i.e. how is the further developing and will the future Versions of Joomla! cover more the needs for Companies to spread Joomla! not only to Enduser but also to Companies.

On the fourth Day of the Systems Robert Deutz and Ann-Kathrin Merz are supporting us here in Munich.

My current opinion is, that the presentation of Joomla! at the Systems in Munich is a full success.

More in the next Blog from Alex

Joomla!,Systems, Munich