Community Blog

Few important changes in 1.5.15 release

kauselot@yahoo.com (Klas Berlič) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:53:32 +0000

To accompany the official release announcement, I would like to point out few of the most important changes in this release:

.htaccess change that prevents looking at your extensions XML files - while this was not a security hole by itself, it kept open doors for hackers to see what version of particular extension you are running. To put this fix into effect you have to uncomment (remove #) from corresponding section (lines 35-39) in htaccess.txt and rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess (or copy/paste that part into your existing .htaccess, must be inserted at the same place).
TEST before you put this on live site - if your site is serving publicly accessible XML than this is not directly usable for you - you would need to make exceptions for those files or use regex based rules for blocking. Also not usable for those without apache/mod_rewrite.

PHP 5.3.x compatibility - Joomla runs fine on PHP 5.3.x now (except of OpenID library)

Core components caching - com_weblinks and com_contact are using cache for the first time. Also com_content view cache comes with more refined caching logic, so that caching is disabled only where it needs to be (e.g. for users using filters). This should result in speed increases on high-traffic sites.

Other notable bugfixes:

TinyMCE is now working properly - all remaining bugs created by the recent TinyMCE upgrade should be gone now
Mootols were upgraded to 1.12 to ensure future compatibility with Firefox 3.6

Note:

For extension developers that would like to enable access to XML inside their extensions, one way would be to create .htaccess in each directory that contains .xml files and put reverse rule in it (or in a directory above those directories that need exceptions - it applies to current directory and all directories bellow):

<Files ~ "\.xml$">
Allow from all
Satisfy all
</Files>

or even more explicit rule, limited only to myfile.xml:

<Files myfile.xml>
Allow from all
Satisfy all
</Files>

A Preview of the New Template Manager in Joomla 1.6

andrew.eddie@community.joomla.org (Andrew Eddie) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:10:33 +0000

Joomla 1.6 will include some important new changes in the Template Manager. This article gives you a preview of what you can likely expect in the final product.

Joomla! Developer Conference

elin.waring@opensourcematters.org (Elin Waring ) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:38:05 +0000

The first ever Joomla! Developer conference is December 5 and 6 in New York City. Seating is limited so you should register now. The conference will focus on working with Joomla 1.6 and is oriented towards extension developers. Speakers include: Louis Landry, Sam Moffatt, Andrew Eddie, Ian MacLennan, and Hannes Papenberg.

A limited number of scholarships are available. These will only cover admission to the conference, not travel or lodging. The final day for scholarship requests is 12 noon New York time on November 4.

Please note that this conference assumes that you already have good working knowledge of Joomla! extension development and the Joomla API. It is appropriate for extension development firms, custom Joomla application developers, and in house Joomla development specialists.

Streaming is planned, so even if you can't come, you can watch.

Please note that hotel space in New York is very tight in December. It is extremely important that you make room reservations early; many hotels are already filled.

Joomla 1.6 Alpha 2 Released

ken.crowder@forum.joomla.org (Ken Crowder) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:09:53 +0000

The Joomla project is pleased to announce the immediate release of Joomla 1.6 alpha 2. This release contains many new features requested by the community; most notably, ACL. Other features are listed below as well as what you can expect in the future for Joomla 1.6.

This is an alpha release. It is intended to be a developer/hobbyist preview and is not intended to be used on a production web site.

Joomla Community Building - my view

brad.baker@joomla.org (Brad Baker) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:09:45 +0000

Of course, everyone has their own opinions on this subject, just like everyone has their own preferences on operating system, web browser etc. So, the following brief thoughts are just an expression of my opinion on this subject. BTW I prefer Mac OS, Firefox/Google Chrome

What prompted me to write this post?
Having recently (last weekend) attended the Sydney JoomlaDay and now preparing for the Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam JoomlaDay the subject of community is on my mind. Now that is out of the way.. here goes.

Everyone has their own expectations when it comes to their involvement with Joomla. Often, people ask me for my reasons, primarily I tell them "Joomla is a great platform to make a living upon". Perhaps you feel the same way, or not. I know some people are here to 'make a difference to the world' and I also respect their reasons for their involvement in the Joomla Community.

That being said, reflecting on the times when I feel most *among* the Joomla Community, it would have to be when attending a Joomla Event. Again, you may agree, or not. So, as I prepare for my own exciting trip to Vietnam to attend the Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam JoomlaDay I'm reminded that I'm going to once again rub shoulders with the Joomla Community, in the flesh.

If there is any Joomla Community building or grassroots effort to improve things, I'd have to say, at these events such as JoomlaDay's as well as Joomla User Groups (JUGS) meetings is where it will have to begin.

So, in conclusion: Whatever your reason for being here, if you want to share that reason, help make a difference, or just increase your contacts with the Joomla Community, be sure to come along and attend a Joomla Event sometime.

I'd also just like to add, it's always a pleasure to get together with people like Andrew Eddie and Sam Moffatt who also attended the Sydney JoomlaDay along with a large number of others. When it comes to ensuring the Joomla Project codewise is sound, and driving ahead, these are the kinds of people who deserve our support. When was the last time you thanked someone like them?

There are a few more I'd like to mention by name (though I will obviously be forgetting some) who continue to be invaluable members of our community: Louis Landry, Chris Davenport, Elin Waring, Mark Dexter, Hannes (and all the other devs working hard on 1.6) all the JED and JRD Editors, the tireless hardworking forum moderators, as well as the people like Paul and Airton who help to look after this very site. There are scores of humble people who you don't hear much from that do so much, like Wendy Robinson, Dave Huelsmann, Ryan Ozimek and Claire Mandville.. and many more who's names I know I've forgotten.

Lift your eyes just a little, and you see people doing similar things in the Joomla International Communities. When was the last time anyone thanked people like Jean-Marie Simonet (JM) for their efforts? This guy's a trooper who continues to devote himself to Joomla. I think I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture. If you call Andrew Mr Joomla, JM is surely Mr International Joomla (hopefully the Mr Joomla contest doesn't include a swimsuit part).

Ok, and now for the actual final conclusion: See you somewhere out there in the Joomla Community, on our forum etc, or even better at the next Joomla Event I attend, like in Ho Chi Minh City on November 1 2009 at the Vietnam JoomlaDay or next year at Melbourne JoomlaDay 2010.

The Most Popular Open Source CMS

elin.waring@opensourcematters.org (Elin Waring ) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:01:54 +0000

According to a report issued by CMSWire (registration required), the Joomla! community has created the world's most popular open source content management system. Congratulations to everyone who contributed to this: core developers, people who answer forum questions, team members, translators, site implementers, extension developers, template designers, Joomla fans and everyone else who helps make Joomla the great platform that it is.

Millions of people around the world use Joomla everyday to communicate and collaborate. How big is Joomla? In the past month the joomla.org websites had about 5 million visitors from 230 countries. In the Elance Work Index Joomla! is the top ranked application in jobs offered and at oDesk Joomla jobs have doubled in the last year. There have been over three million downloads since June.

The report contains lots of interesting information compiled by Water and Stone. Statistics include everything from downloads to books published to social media mentions. Joomla! lead in many but there is definitely room for improvement on some. This year's report included a small web survey of just over 600 self selected individuals. Although it is always hard to know how to interpret surveys like this, the results did show room for improvement in that a surprisingly high number of respondants reporting having a negative impression. Not that Joomla is anywhere near the worst on that, but it's below four other CMS on this. Social media mentions of Joomla were also lower expected on some metrics, but some of that may be due to the Joomla.org forums being excluded from the analysis.

All in all the report makes for interesting reading with both plenty to smile about but also room to improve. It is great to have this external acknowledgment of the accomplishments of the Joomla Community.

Joomla Connect Feeds Hit with a Hammer

clare.mandville@community.joomla.org (Claire Mandville) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:02:34 +0000

There have been several non joomla.org blog posts about the current situation of the feed content appearing in Joomla Connect.
To this end, without giving several URLs to the many blog posts appearing questioning why their posts have been removed and in some cases dropped altogether, here are some reasons.

So far I have taken a step back approach to (mostly spam) reports on the Joomla Connect Feed. However I and many others will now be a bit more vigorous on the feeds and posts.

Those that don't comply with the terms of carrying the feed and posts will be removed.

Joomla Resources Directory Clean Up

wendy.robinson@forum.joomla.org (Wendy Robinson) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:27:24 +0000

Greetings from the JRD Editorial Team,

The Joomla! Resources Directory has seen some excellent growth since it's inception back in June of this year.

We started out with an overwhelming response from community members to help us 'test drive' the new site and then an absolute FLOOD of listing submissions when we launched the site for public use. This proposed a few problems. Mainly, there's only 4 of us active in the editorial team. Don't get me wrong, we work great as a team but that initial workload for four volunteers with full time lives was trying for all of us and especially for the many
patient people waiting to have their listings approved.

Joomla!Day Mongolia a Great Success

ryan.ozimek@opensourcematters.org (Ryan Ozimek) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:26:54 +0000

In great showing of success, the large auditorium in Ulan Bator's IT Park held a great crowd of Joomla! users from across the city for the first ever Joomla!Day Mongolia. With leadership of the day's events by Mr. T. Altansukh and the Mongolian translation team, this event had much great news to celebrate.

The day's events kicked off with a terrific guest speaker, B. Dolgor, Head of the Cabinet Secretariat for the Mongolian government. She reminded the room of an amazing statistic: nearly the entire Mongolian federal government is now running a Joomla Web site!

Later in the day, the Mongolian Joomla translation team was able to show off their 2 years of hard work, completely translating both the front-end and back-end of Joomla into Mongolian.

Check out the Joomla!Day Mongolia slideshow and an interview of me by a Mongolian television station!

Key to my goals for attending this event was to ensure that the Joomla project had a strong focus on expanding its efforts for outreach into the Mongolia, a vibrant community that's excited to take on new challenges in the technology and policy worlds with Joomla.

I'm happy to report that this goal was met and exceeded!

The Joomla!Day event itself included a variety of presenters and topics, including:

Role of ICTA in providing low-cost Mongolian language IT solutions
Role of EPRC/USAID and international cooperation
Open Source software: Philosophy and licensing requirements
Introduction of Joomla! 1.5 Mongolian language package
Demonstration of websites and portals using Joomla! 1.5 Mongolian language package
Joomla’s availability, licensing requirements, distribution, technical resources
General discussion, questions and answers

On the second day of events, Mr. Altansukh lead a full room through a complete guided training of Joomla, utilizing their new Mongolian language package.

Many thanks to Mr. Altansukh and the rest of the Mongolian translation team, as well as to EPRC/USAID for their continued support of the Joomla project.

Check out the Joomla!Day Mongolia slideshow

I'm looking forward to seeing continued success in the Mongolian community, and I'm excited to share the lessons learned from the Mongolian on their huge success with the Mongolian Federal government.

"You can't go in there"

hannes.papenberg@community.joomla.org (Hannes Papenberg) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:55:03 +0000

That's what you will be able to say from now on when you explain your new site to someone else. Yes, we finally found a solution for the access management problems in Joomla and it is also already implemented in the trunk.

One of Joomla's biggest weaknesses so far has been the missing control over who can do what in Joomla. You only had those three view levels (Public, Registered, Special) and seven usergroups that had fixed, site-wide permissions. New usergroups? Restricting a usergroup to one category only? Not possible in Joomla up to now. This is a problem that has been bothering us all for years and it was the initial reason why I got interested in helping out in the Joomla project and doing development. That's four years ago. And even before that, Andrew Eddie had been working on this issue for another two years. So this really has a long history already.

Some of you might think we are making this too big of a problem. Yes, you can just slap an access management solution in there and hope that it works and that people can use it. On the other hand, we have a huge developer community and Joomla is used in a wide range of situations. Nobody really cares how the access management looks and how fast it is, if the administrator has studied computer science and the site has no visitors. But we were aiming for the opposite. We wanted to make this easy, so that everybody can use this system and that at the same time you don't feel any performance issues. That took time.

As of last night, we finally have found a solution that provides the maximum of flexibility, is usable by a four year-old and wont have any really measurable impact on the performance. Now I've been talking about "we" all the time and before I dive into the specifics of the system, I want to explain who that "we" is. There are several people that had direct or indirect influence to this development. A lot of ideas have come up on the Joomla development mailing list and I want to thank everybody who participated in these discussions. I also want to thank Mike Benoit, who wrote phpGACL, which has been the basis for much of our ideas and gave us great inspiration for the different solutions. Directly involved in the final development of this solution (and thus deserving an extra round of applause) are the following people: Louis Landry, Andrew Eddie, Rob Schley, Sam Moffatt, Ron Severdia, Ercan Özkaya, Gergo Erdosi and myself. Thanks also to all the people that we had inspiring talks with about this and who provided new insights into the problem.

Ok, now to the interesting part: How does it work? As with most good and beautiful systems, the idea is pretty simple. First of all, of course you can now create new groups and assign users to more than one group. These groups are formed in a tree, which means that if you are a member of the group "Administrator," you automatically inherit access rights from the group "Manager" below you. You are basically not limited in how you create your usergroups, but we will most likely make the groups "Public," "Registered," and "Super Administrator" fixed, just to make sure no one accidentally destroys his whole website and has no access to anything anymore.

Now we want to assign access rights to these groups. We want to allow one group to create articles, weblinks, newsfeeds and just about everything that you can create in Joomla. We don't want them to be able to publish any of that, so we give them the global "create" permission, but not the "edit state" permission. They, however, should be able to publish articles, so we go into the article manager in the global preferences into the "Permissions" tab. There we see the same permissions like in the global permissions screen. Here we select the "edit state" permission for that group and now this group can create everywhere in the system, but only publish articles. We also want them to be able to delete articles in one special category. To set this, we edit that category and, again, see the same permissions like in the global permissions screen and the global preferences screen. Here we allow them to delete articles.

That group is pretty powerful now. Remember, we allowed them to create content in every component. But maybe we don't want them to be able to create modules. Now that is easy, we just go into the module manager and instead of letting it inherit from the global "create" permission, we deny that group that permission in this component. So, not only can you set allow permissions from global down to single content items, you can also set them both to "allow" or "deny."

While this system covers all the administrative tasks for the website, we have one "small" area left: Viewing permissions. Up to Joomla 1.6 you had the three viewlevels "Public," "Registered," and "Special." In Joomla 1.6, you will have those, too, but you will also be able to add additional view levels to this list and especially select who should be able to see these.

Now that we've covered the basic functions for the end user, some more information for the technically interested audience: How does the system work on a database level? The basis for the permissions is the #__assets table. This table is modelled after the nested sets model and first and foremost has a root node for the system wide permissions. The direct children of this root node are the different components that we have installed. If that component has content (in contrast to a system-tool like a file manager, for example) each content item has a child in an appropriate tree underneath the component node. In each row we have a JSON-encoded array of permissions. If you access a content item, the respective node is loaded and the complete tree down to the root node is loaded with it. Now that content item inherits down along the whole line of three the permissions. The view levels are a bit simpler. We just have a JSON-encoded array of the usergroup IDs that are allowed to see this view level.

You are most likely asking yourself at this moment, "how complicated it is going to be to add all this to your own component?" Explaining all this here in this posting would be a bit much, but let me reassure you that it is dead easy. We are of course going to write good documentation about this and with that documentation it shouldn't take you more than a good hour to get your component up and running.

I am very excited about all of this, because we've made a giant leap with this development and decision in the last days and although there is still some work to be done, we are a lot further with Joomla 1.6 towards a release. Very soon already we can declare the development features complete and begin bug fixing. Then its just a short jump to a stable release.

As I said, there is still some work to be done, like the global permissions screen, and we need a lot of polishing, but if you want to take a look at what is there so far, get yourself a copy of the SVN or a nightly build. Remember: This is not ready for production use!