A quick roundup of the last London Joomla User group meeting, which took place on Tuesday 16 April 2013.
The meeting was streamed for the first time, as an experiment but the feedback from the tester was positive so hopefully remote participation will become availabe in future months.
Our main discussion centred around future developments in Joomla. Chris Davenport, one of the main Joomla developers, has made a major push to create a Web Services API for Joomla. He argues, Joomla really needs this to allow data to be consumed across a wide array of platforms and devices. As an example a native mobile app would benefit from a true API to Joomla rather than the usual hodge podge of techniques that are practically written from scratch each time. He’s created a Kickstarter project to raise some funds.
In related news, Joomla have recently made announcement saying the Joomla platform is being renamed a framework. This has apparently been done to allow a faster development of the underlying Joomla codebase, of which the Joomla CMS that is what we all use, is just an application of that codebase. The idea Joomla can be used for other things besides websites.
Our discussions went to the usual problem solving open forum and there were lots of good questions and suggested solutions.
Of note was a Firefox plugin called User Agent Switcher – this allows you to appear to sites as (for example) Googlebot – the search engines directory spider. This can be of particular use to track down malware. Some malware that infects Joomla/PHP sites only reveals itself to Googlebot in an attempt to poison the search results.
Security was a topic revisited and Login Failed Log was mentioned – though this is more for information than prevention. Basic security measure like using a complex password and not using the default username of admin or administrator were critical.
Other items mentioned in passing includes:
- Website Optimisation Seminar (free): www.houseofkaizen.com/conversion-optimisation-seminar-london
- CRM for non-profits: www.civiCRM.org
- New computer/human interface: Leapmotion.com
- Security device using webcam in neat way: demopass.co.uk
- Compare the size (in lines of code) of Joomla, Drupal etc: Ohloh.net
- Joomla sandbox: Molajo – still continuing
- Joomla 1.5 – gets the time wrong in Daylight Saving (summer time): Joomla 1.5 extensions
What is Joomla?
Joomla is one of the top 3 most popular web content management systems on the planet and it currently powers almost 3% of all the world’s websites. It is an entirely community-driven project and does not employ any paid staff to work on its development. It is mostly written in PHP and is available for free under the GNU/GPL v2 or later license. You can find out more here: www.joomla.org.
2020Media is a UK Joomla host that offers specialist knowledge of Joomla including web hosting, migrations and troubleshooting. To find out more see: www.2020media.com/joomla
Joomla! User Group London is for anyone of any experience to discuss and promote Joomla! in London. It’s free to attend and meets on the third Tuesday of every month.