Design vs. Develop

Have a look. Fortunately, I was able to finish voting within an hour. And I used a paper ballot, thank you very much.

It’s official: preorders are being taken for the second edition of Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development! Thanks goes out to everyone who bought the first edition and offered their praise as well as critiques. I’ve incorporated a lot of the suggestions and the book is better for it. Here are some of the additions to the new book:

• Fuller coverage of the model-view-controller design pattern. This is now introduced much earlier in the book and is used much more thoroughly.
• Use of the MooTools JavaScript framework.
• More of the extras: elements generated by JHTML, pagination, and internationalization among other features.

While helping people get the Podcast Suite up and running, I’m noticing that a lot of people are running vulnerable, outdated copies of Joomla! 1.5.x. Keeping your Joomla! site running with the latest patches is a MUST. The Joomla! core team, working groups, security team, and bug squad all jump in and help write a patch whenver a vulnerability is discovered. However, these patches do no good if they are not applied to your site.

So how do you stay on top of Joomla! security issues and releases? The download page for Joomla! now has a handy form where you can sign up for email alerts. If you prefer RSS, use this feed link. (BTW: the current version as of this writing is 1.5.7, with a 1.5.8 maintenance release around the corner.)

Earlier this week, I attended PHP Appalachia in Pigeon Forge, TN. We rented this ginormous cabin (scroll all the way down) just to hang out and talk about PHP. I finally met several people who I’ve missed in my failure to show up for Zendcon all these years.

As far as presentations went, Ben Ramsey started with his “frankenstein talk” on REST, focusing on how REST is an architecture for the web itself. Brian DeShong showed us how to rickroll people on any phone using WURFL, PHP, and ffmpeg. Matthew Turland talked about the PHP-based IRC bot named Phergie and corrected me on the pronounciation of my last name (he’s correct, it’s Luh-blon instead of Luh-blon-k).

Brandon Savage led a roundtable discussion (although we were actually seated in the living room on couches) about creating a PHP clone of Trac. Brian Moon talked about the process he uses to load all of the world’s products into the dealnews database. Rob Peck talked about using PHP with Asterisk through the Asterisk Gateway Interface. Finally, Paul Reinheimer gave a presentation on Magento and how to let your open-source contributors know they’re appreciated.

Aside from the talks, we soaked in a hot tub, watched movies, played pool, quizzed each other on PHP trivia, and ate some delicious chicken and sausage gumbo made by Matthew’s wife Whitney. The only thing we didn’t do was spend hours on Internet thanks to satellite connectivity. We talked to each other instead

Mike Brogan has started a podcast about Joomla! simply called The Joomla Podcast. He’s been regularly releasing episodes over the past couple of months and is now up to #6. The show is a good balance between project news, component reviews, tips, and Mike’s own two cents. Anyone who’s a fan of Joomla will get something out of the podcast.

I’m getting caught up on it as I write this blog post :D.

Lynda.com now has videos available on the most popular open-source programs for publishing content. There’s the one on Joomla! I recorded, one on Wordpress by Maria Langer, and now one on Drupal by Tom Geller. So which one is right for your next site? Sign up for an Online Training Library account today and find out!

For $25, you get a month-long subscription where you can watch all of our videos in their entirety and as many times as you wish. You will also have access to the rest of the video library which covers topics like Flash, HTML, Photoshop, CS3, and Search Engine Optimization. Use Lynda.com to learn everything you need to know for launching your next site!

UPDATE: As Maria pointed out in the comments, you can watch the first few videos of each Lynda.com title for free. This will give you a general feel for each system.

A beta for Podcast Suite 1.5 is now available. Read the details here.

(UPDATE: I’ve closed comments on this post, please go to the forum for help and discussion)

Yesterday, I decided to install the blogging software Habari on my computer to see what the buzz was about. Overall, I’m impressed with the system and I think it shows a lot of promise for the future. It’s all written in modern PHP 5 (5.2 is the minimum) with PDO so you are not tied to MySQL. Installation was very easy (after I added FollowSymLinks to my .htaccess file). The backend is slick and powered with keyboard shortcuts. Performance seemed fast, but a localhost environment doesn’t really give you a good measure of this so YMMV.

My only complaint about the system is one that I also have with WordPress: the theming system breaks everything into entirely too many pieces. Tags open in one file and close in another. Loops are all over the place. You have to create a class in theme.php to pull in and assign data to the theme. This will certainly difficult for most designers to get their heads around.

I’m definitely a fan of Joomla!’s templating system. While Joomla! is a more general-purpose content management system and Habari is focused on blogging, I think the overall concept could be ported. In Joomla! templates, you have all of the essential markup from <html> to </html> in one file. Within this file, you add named placeholders (bottom, left, right, main, banner, etc…). What goes into these placeholders is determined by the admin of the Joomla! site. This makes it easy for admins to rearrange the elements to suit their desires, while template designers need not touch a line of PHP. In Joomla! templates, desigers can rely on the default core output, then override specific elements only when necessary.

Habari is still in alpha (version 0.6), but it seems to be maturing very quickly. If you’re doing blog sites and are up for something new, definitely give Habari a test. I’m looking forward to the betas and stable copies, but hope that the templating can be simplified drastically.

If you’re heading out to California for ZendCon in a few weeks, don’t miss ZendUnCon. Keith Casey is heading up this unconference, which already has several interesting talks. I’m now kicking myself for not signing up for ZendCon

Attention Podcast Suite lovers:

Dan Li and I have been polishing the 1.5 version of the Podcast Suite. The UI is more or less complete and you can take a peek at the SVN copy. Are you interested in writing a user’s guide or an FAQ? Contact me or leave a comment below! If you know how to use the current Podcast Suite, documenting this one will be a snap.