Joomla User Group Report 17 Jan 2012
Jan/121
Joomla User Group - Jug - geddit?
The first London Joomla user group meeting took place at UCL on 17 January. The user group is open to all with an interest in Joomla and no level of technical knowledge is required. This meeting welcomed many new faces and we hope they’ll join the user group again.
Joomla Template Overrides
There was no set agenda this month, but a topic that was explored in detail was template overrides. Joe from Softforge demonstrated the technique which allows you to modify the look and feel of your site in ways beyond what is built into the template options. By using template overrides you avoid modifying core Joomla files and this means you can update Joomla when you need to, without worrying about breaking your website. The technique is simple in essence, though finding the right files or files to move does require some knowledge, and asking the usergroup is a great place to get some help.
- Copy Joomla core file to appropriate location within template folder
- Modify copied file as required.
- Reload Joomla page (clearing cache if needed).
It was suggested that template overrides be covered in more detail in another user group meeting.
News from the Joomla eco-sphere
- Virtuemart out. The big daddy of Joomla shopping cart is finally released and feedback was good
- K2 out. A component the replaces the ‘article’ with more extendible functions. think of Joomla! articles with additional fields for article images, videos, image galleries and attachments.
- Rockettheme dropping Drupal. Popular Joomla template shop will stop developing themes for Drupal after low takeup.
- Joomla 2.5, the next long term stable release is due for release on 24 Jan. Joomla 1.5 reaches end of life in April 2012.
Mootools/jquery
Mootools is a bundle of javascript included in Joomla core and is often used for making sliders and pop up photo galleries. Many third-party extensions use the jquery javascript library for their functions and there is currently a debate around including jquery within Joomla core. At the moment you often get several copies of jquery loaded by different extensions (and often different versions of jquery at that!). The argument against adding jquery to Joomla core is that recently a lot of work has been focussed on making the core as lightweight as possible.
The next meeting is on February 21st. If you plan on attending, let us know at 2020Media and we’ll see you there.
Joomla! 2.5 to be released January 2012
Jan/120
Joomla! 2.5 will be released in January 2012 and it is the successor of Joomla! 1.5. It will be a so called long term release and it will be the Joomla! state of the art until July 2013. The versions 1.6 and 1.7 were short term releases and they paved the way to Joomla! 2.5.
New Features
Joomla 2.5 will have a host of new features including new search functionality, multi-database support, and update notification.
Search is “reinvented” in Joomla! 2.5 with Finder. The new finder component works with a search index.
New Search Function in Joomla
Based on Finder, which was developed by jXtended, Joomla 2.5 has added an exciting new natural language search function. This feature incorporated auto-completion and stemming. Stemming is the ability for the search to use the root of the word you entered to locate matches. While there is still work to be done, this search is also much better at searching in languages other than English.
This new search is faster and more versatile that the standard search. The data is indexed to get this flexibility and speed. New plugins are required to use this search. Joomla ships with the new core extension plugins, but other extension developers will need to create their own plugins to work with this new search. By default, the standard search is active and this new search is disabled. You can enable the plugin and index your files when the extensions you want to search have the new plugins.
More Databases
With Joomla! 2.5 it will be possible to run Joomla! on MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Drivers for PostgreSQL and Oracle seems to be very near (Getting Ready for Multi-Database Support).
Joomla Update Notification
The number one request from ideas.joomla.org was for Joomla to tell the site administrator when Joomla needs to be updated. Site administrators will now be able to see as soon as they log in if Joomla is out of date. They can then click the button and be taken to the one-click update to Joomla. A second icon does the same thing for any non-core components that are set up for the one-click updating by their developers.
User registrations with CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA plugin using the reCAPTCHA service can be enabled. Once you sign up for free with reCAPTCHA and enter your keys, you can enable CAPTCHA on new user registrations. It could also be used by other extensions needing CAPTCHA. This helps stop spammers signing up to your site.
Better Choices for Offline Mode
You can use the default offline message, disable it or create a customized message. Additionally you can select an image for the offline mode page. You have even a possibility to set the site to offline mode during installation so no unauthorized people can see it before you want them to.
Why 2.5? What happened to 1.8?
New Release Cycle
Every 18 months, a long term release of Joomla! will appear. That’s why 2.5 will be released this month. The .5 signifies a long term release. Moving from 1.7 to 2.5 can be done with the one-click upgrade within Joomla and most extensions that run on 1.7 should also run on 2.5.
Joomla 2.5 is the direct upgrade for Joomla 1.7. Joomla 1.7 will be supported for critical security issues only for a period of one month after the release of Joomla 2.5. After that time, only Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 2.5 will be supported by the Joomla project. Note that Joomla version 2.5 is a long-term-support (LTS) release and will be supported for at least 18 months.
Further Reading
- Looking for UK Joomla Hosting? Try Hosting from 2020Media.
- What’s New in Joomla 2.5
- New Features in 2.5
How to display more than 20 items in Joomla Admin
Dec/110
There is a default of 20 line items set in many Joomla backend administration menus – including articles, modules, plugins and the extension manager. This ‘lines per page’ can be changed but it’s not stored next time you login. Here’s how to permanently get Joomla to remember how many lines you’d like to see.
Global configuration > Site settings > List Length
This screenshot is for Joomla 1.5:
The configuration screen in Joomla 1.5
Here’s the same setting in Joomla 1.6, 1.7 and beyond. Click to enlarge.
Configuration page in Joomla 1.7
For more on Joomla, see www.2020media.com/joomla
Joomla! Day UK 2011
Sep/111
2020Media was proud to sponsor this year’s Joomla! conference Sept 24-25th 2011.
Joomla!Day events are a great opportunity for the community to come together and share learning, find out about the latest developments, meet the people behind the extensions which they use, and network with others who are involved in this area of website design.
With 175 delegates from around the world, Joomla!Day UK 2011 brought together people from all walks of life with every possible level of experience with Joomla! – from complete beginners who had never installed the popular open source content management system, through to developers who have been part of the team since the project began, and everything in between.
Microsoft kindly provided their offices, allowing the event exclusive use of their amazing facilities including a 200+ seat auditorium and 15 breakout rooms, as well as excellent hostesses who ensured that everybody was registered quickly and found their way to the right rooms during the event.
Videos of the sessions are being edited and will be appearing on the Joomla!Day UK 2011 website and YouTube channel, along with slides from all speakers.
Ryan Ozimek, the President of Open Source Matters (OSM), gave the keynote on the first day.
Ryan reminded the conference that the future for Joomla goes well beyond the CMS. The CMS has been an amazing piece of software, built by the community and extended by the community, but has been focused mostly on Web publishing. Ryan said “When I visit universities and talk to young people, they’re not that interested in building the next commenting system or blogging platform. They want to use Joomla to build the next Twitter or Facebook.”
2020Media is a proud supporter of the Joomla! project from events like Joomla!Day, Usergroups, the Extension Directory and providing top-class hosting facilities here in the UK.
London Joomla User Group report
Sep/111
The September London Joomla User Group meeting took place with less than a week to go until the only UK Joomla conference of 2011 – Joomla!Day UK 2011. Several of the speakers were at the meeting and we were given a preview of one of the talks coming up on Sunday.
Coupon code for 100% discount on your extra tickets is MAXIMUM.
Use the code for today (Wednesday 21st September) only.
Other topics discussed were getting Joomla running on a local Windows setup for development (Microsoft’s Web Matrix was recommended); the imminent release of the long awaited VirtueMart 2 – this will actually be released during Joomla Day London; a discussion about everyone’s favourite extensions; and finally we talked about making Joomla fast.
Jet Set Joomla
We asked what the fastest Joomla theme was – Afterburner from Rockettheme was suggested; honourable mentions went to Joomlapolis and Morph.
To further increase your site’s speed, use of a content delivery network was suggested – although not free, these can definitely help. If you sign up via the guy who makes the Joomla plugin there’s a discount for one popular commerical CDN.
Use Firebug for Firefox to check the download speed of all the components of your site – find out if anything is dragging your load times down.
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