Joomla User Group Report 17 Jan 2012

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.

1. Copy Joomla core file to appropriate location within template folder
2. Modify copied file as required.
3. 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.

www.2020media.com/joomla

Joomla User Group January

With the release of Joomla 1.6 just announced the question on everyone’s lips was: “Should I upgrade?”. After some discussion the group decided that at this point, an upgrade should not be done to an existing site. Only if a new site was being built should Joomla 1.6 be used.

Joomla 1.5 will be fully supported for at least 1 year, so there is time for the new release to settle in, and perhaps easy upgrade tools will be developed.
Some of the developers at the meeting also said they’d not be using Joomla 1.6 just yet as it was likely to contain some bugs and they’d wait for Joomla 1.6.4 (or thereabouts) to be released.

The discussion on Joomla 1.6 moved on to Molajo, which is a package of Joomla components plus some coding changes over the standard Joomla. Molajo was set up fairly recently by some of the people who have had a lot of involvment in Joomla.  It remains to be seen whether it will develop into a true fork of Joomla, or if the features tried out and testing in Molajo will make their way back to the core. Check out Nooku framework too.

The main presentation described how to get started with creating a new Joomla template. Melvyn Phillips showed how to use an off-the-shelf CSS framework to quickly put together a grid based site. Given the complexity of Joomla, creating a new template may seem offputting to many. Melvyn showed us how to create a basic 3 column template from scratch in just 5 minutes.

2020Media was recently asked to take over hosting of a legacy Joomla 1.0 website and we completed the migration successfully this week. The customers website had been broken because their host upgraded their server to a new version of PHP without telling them. At 2020Media we never do this.

For any enquiries about Joomla 1.5, 1.6 or even 1.0, please contact us.