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The cookbook is available via Packt Publishing. Well-written and thorough, this reference book will not only help introduce new Joomla! developers to the Joomla! framework, but can also serve as a great reference for experienced developers needing to brush up on some best practices. Full disclosure: I was one of the technical reviewers of the book. Check out the book online, and order it as a holiday gift for that Joomla! lover on your list, or for yourself!
As noted last week, the overall project will see a total of five Sister Community sites launch this summer. These sites empower local Communities to craft their own message for their individual audiences while leveraging the common branding and shared experience on the Soapbox platform of the network as a whole.
Sisters of Mercy are an international community of Roman Catholic women religious vowed to serve people who suffer from poverty, sickness and lack of education with a special concern for women and children. They are also a dear, long-standing client of PICnet’s. When they came to us looking to expand their web presence by creating sites for their five individual chapters throughout the country, we saw the perfect opportunity to leverage the power, flexibility, and elegance of the new Soapbox 2.0 platform to meet their needs. The West Midwest Chapter is the inaugural site to launch of these Sister sites with others scheduled to go live over the next few weeks. All sites make use of a handcrafted PICnet design customized to offer consistent branding across all project sites while offering Community-specific touches with color schemes and menu options.
In early April 2009, we launched Soapbox 2.0, a system that allows organizations to enjoy the power of Joomla! 1.5 without needing to worry about common open source hurdles, like installation, hosting, and full-service support. It also consists of some awesome new components that Joomla! lacks out-of-the-box, such as our Taxonomy 1.0. Just 30 minutes ago, we officially launched Soapbox 2.0.4, which gave us an opportunity to improve some key functions within our Taxonomy extension. These improvements will make our Soapbox clients quite happy, and include key updates like the creation of hierarchical term (or tag) structure for your content with a slick implementation of RSS feeds per term. You can also change the view of the term to be like Joomla’s Category List Layout or Section Blog Layout. What does all this mean? It means that you can now provide several ways for your audience to view an article/page without duplication, maintain a list of terms/tags without overcrowding your tag cloud, and better meet your audience’s hunger for specific tag-specific information. Enjoy it! I know these folks will – Behind the Green.
As co-maintainer, Kevin is, “…responsible for comitting patches that have moved to “ready-to-commit” status. Before they commit the code changes they do a final code validation (standards, quality, docbook mark-ups etc.).” In short, he’s one of the last folks to check the code before it goes into the Joomla codebase. Congratulations to Kevin on this achievement, it’s an honor having Joomla superstars like him on the team!
Kevin wrote “Extending the User Object in Joomla! 1.5” as a tutorial to teach developers how to easily add additional data elements for users within Joomla. From the magazine:
Joomla developers, enjoy! Kevin, keep rocking!
It’s early in the morning here in NYC, and just as I’m getting to board the train back to PICnet for my annual address to the company, I see the following good news on the Joomla! Web site: Joomla 1.5 is stable! What an effort it’s been. With a complete rewrite of the code base, making it sleeker and more elegant for developers and users alike, Joomla! 1.5 comes out of the door with a bang today. While I’ve got to run to the train station this morning, I’m expecting a long day of celebrations ahead for everyone in the community. Congratulations everyone, especially Louis and Johan, whose vision helped propel the code base to be what it is today. Also, big thanks to PICnetter Kevin Devine, who’s work in the past few months in bug squashing has lead to many great strides forward in the 1.5 trunk.
What some thought would normally take 4 weeks was completed in just two days. In San Francisco, we had a blast. Today brought us two additional community members, including Steve Reichgut (all the way from Tracy) and Ron Severdia. Their efforts brought our daily total of seven SF community members doing their best to help get 1.5 out the door. Helped by a good dosage of snacks provided graciously by Debbie, freshly brewed coffee, and a nice view of the SF bay from the PICnet SF corner window, developers went to town slaying the bugs.
Wilco stepped up to the mic and called from the NY location to the DC location, and gave us some marching orders. In general, our goal was to make sure that we weren’t duplicating efforts on the patches. So, we created a Google doc, which allowed people to post which bug artefact they were working on, and then notify Wilco of the start of their work. So far, things have gone much more smoothly than I had ever imagined. Big thanks to the likes of Wilco, Elin, Rob, Kenneth, and Louis for their long travels to be on the scene to give guidance to the community as we patch away. Even bigger props to the 39 community members around the world that have taken time from their Saturdays to make this a reality. And finally, to my fellow PICnetters, thank you for the donation of your time to make sure we’re rocking smoothly here. More updates coming throughout the day! Photos after the jump.
I don’t know about you, but I got MooTools fever. I love it. It has turned me on to Javascript. To make matters worse, there are some great 3rd party developers making some really cool stuff. Like Calendar. It is a “Javascript class that adds accessible and unobtrusive date-pickers to your form elements”. All done in MooTools. Wow, now that is incredible! Could we possibly see it override or take the place of the current Joomla 1.5 JS Calendar?
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The holiday season is all about delicious foods and favorites, right? Well, this new recipe collection may not have your typical ingredients list and steps to preparing Grandma’s peach crumble, but the 
After receiving the firehose of 
As the sun sets on most of the bug squashing locations this afternoon, we in San Francisco are also winding down on what has been a tremendous community effort. In less than 48 hours, developers and testers around the globe have squashed more Joomla 1.5 bugs than we ever could have imagined.
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