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Today, on the 1st of September 5 years ago Joomla was unveiled to the world for the first time. Its time for celebrations for the Joomla community world wide which is one of the most diverse communities in the Open Source world. With the least entry barriers , here anyone can come in & take leadership & make change happen. It is this marvelous community of users, developers, designers, documentation creators , bug reporters & fixers, evangelists & every single person that has touched & been touched by this piece of software.
Joomla has come a long long way since that 5 years ago. Today it feeds many mouths in more ways than one & i am sure that all together, the jobs it has created can compete with any of the top fortune 500 companies in the world. It runs close to 2.5% of the sites on the web today. It is used by organizations as large as Apple, McDonald’s and the United Nations and by millions of people for their companies, hobbies and charities.
Today as we look back, we are hit with a wave of nostalgia..so today, we'll tell you our Joomla Story.
At Tekdi we've been using SugarCRM since long to manage all the customers leads and other possible data. The part after that - a solid project management system has always been a point of contention and we've switched to and fro with many systems, notably dotproject (DP). Recently I got to know about redmine and since then have shifted over to the same.
To ease things, previously I had created a small bridge between Sugar and dotproject that automagically creates a project in DP once an opportunity is marked as 'closed won'. This was easily managed since both systems are PHP.
Enter redmine and I was looking at a something written in ruby/rails - hieroglyphics to me ! I soon realised that it had a rest api that allowed creating projects. However when I tried to use the API it kept on giving errors and I was left with directly dealing with the MySQL db. Upon seeing that redmine uses the Nested set model to store data I simply gave up the idea of creating a bridge.
Redmine then released v1.0.0in late July and the API is dramatically improved and works well. Now I could get my bridge to work. Creating a custom override in Sugar did the trick and I was now able to create projects in redmine.
To use the bridge, place the Opportunities folder in the following folder in SugarCRM
[sugarcrm root]/custom/modules
In the past few months, there have been some major announcements that have rocked the world of Social Networks. NING's announcement of phasing out free Social Networks have got many network admins worrying about what to do next. With the only way out being to pay to upgrade to NING's premium plans , admins have no other option than migrating to either a different system or a platform of their own.
Other SAAS options include KickApps , SocialGO which include a free solution besides their premium services. The other alternative that some might prefer would be to move to your own platform. If you are looking at going this route there are solutions like Elgg, BuddyPress , JomSocial available.
With JomSocial going GPL this month, it looks like a really promising alternative.
This blog will talk mainly about migrating from Ning to JomSocial & the options you have for the features that Ning has in this approach.
Recently looking at some extensions, i realized that a whole lot of Joomla extensions use a lot of custom js to add validations to their forms. While this might be needed in some cases, 90% of the times you should be able to use the inbuilt Joomla validation available via the mootools validate.js . Working using in built Joomla functions will help keep you code free from excessive external js & reduce the bloat. A lot of times it will also help reduce JS conflicts.
Ironically i was prompted to write this blog post when we discovered one of our old extensions having this very issue ! While making the corrections i thought a small blog about using native Joomla validation might be helpful to a lot of devs.
So here is how you go about adding Joomla form validation...
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A couple of weeks back, I wrote about a component that can convert posts from CB profilebook to JomSocial wall posts. At the same time we'd also developed another one to convert the images from the BC profile gallery plugin into JomSocial albums. |
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The tricky part here was the mammoth 5GB worth of photos that needed to be resized and refit to Jomsocial size & standard. I've implemented a batch size option so that only some photos are processed at every run.
The component created a single JomSocial album for each user and adds all their CB photos into that album.
As before, I'm attaching the script to this post so that people who're stuck at the same problem benefit from my script :). It's a simple single file component that you need to put in your administrator/components folder. Once done, simply run the component via the admin -
http://yoursite.com/administrator/index.php?option=com_cmmg
CB profile gallery to JomSocial photos