Displaying items by tag: joomla
F-i-n-a-l-l-y! Goodbye, adieu, sayonara, άντε γεια & good riddance to Joomla LTS releases!
The Joomla team has decided to ditch the Ubuntu style release cycle (a truly WTF decision in the first place) and once and for all end confusion to developers, users, customers and clients from hell.
This means that the current release (3.x) is the current stable release. There is NO need to use Joomla 2.5 anymore. It won't be more stable compared to Joomla 3.x. And when 4.x is released, that will be the new stable release and so on.
An exception will be made for Joomla 2.5 and it will be supported until the end of 2014. Joomla development will then shift entirely to Joomla 3.x.
The Joomla team has decided to ditch the Ubuntu style release cycle (a truly WTF decision in the first place) and once and for all end confusion to developers, users, customers and clients from hell.
This means that the current release (3.x) is the current stable release. There is NO need to use Joomla 2.5 anymore. It won't be more stable compared to Joomla 3.x. And when 4.x is released, that will be the new stable release and so on.
An exception will be made for Joomla 2.5 and it will be supported until the end of 2014. Joomla development will then shift entirely to Joomla 3.x.
2013 is bringing a lot of new cool things from the JoomlaWorks labs. New extensions that we hope will redefine essential functionality within any Joomla site and lots of updates to our existing line of extensions, like K2, Frontpage Slideshow and Simple Image Gallery Pro. The latter will now become a "component based" extension (from just a plugin) to allow content managers to easily create and edit image galleries and their captions for K2 and any other extension within Joomla.
We've always put user friendlyness and ease of use above all when building our extensions. At least up to what's possible for any type of extension. Simple Image Gallery Pro was great (and still is) as a plugin that allows you to zip a bunch of files and quickly transform them to an image gallery grid. It's no wonder why the free version is one of the most popular extensions in the Joomla Extensions Directory for many years now. People hate to use tools that take more time to deal with than the actual content they're producing. If it takes you more time to upload a gallery than shooting the actual pictures, then there's a problem. And unfortunately, many gallery components in the Joomlasphere simply fail to deliver what they promise.
We've always put user friendlyness and ease of use above all when building our extensions. At least up to what's possible for any type of extension. Simple Image Gallery Pro was great (and still is) as a plugin that allows you to zip a bunch of files and quickly transform them to an image gallery grid. It's no wonder why the free version is one of the most popular extensions in the Joomla Extensions Directory for many years now. People hate to use tools that take more time to deal with than the actual content they're producing. If it takes you more time to upload a gallery than shooting the actual pictures, then there's a problem. And unfortunately, many gallery components in the Joomlasphere simply fail to deliver what they promise.
A few days ago we launched SocialConnect, a new kind of social extension for Joomla which we plan to extend over time to become the no. 1 integration hub for social networks for your Joomla site.
It's part of our "masterplan" to redefine what we consider basic functionality for any Joomla site. It started with K2 and now it's moving deeper into more specialized areas. SocialConnect is an extension that -as with all things made by JoomlaWorks- came out from a real need. And it was tested extensively for more than a year on the K2 Community, before being publicly released.
It's part of our "masterplan" to redefine what we consider basic functionality for any Joomla site. It started with K2 and now it's moving deeper into more specialized areas. SocialConnect is an extension that -as with all things made by JoomlaWorks- came out from a real need. And it was tested extensively for more than a year on the K2 Community, before being publicly released.
As I was cleaning up my bookmarks today (they've reached around 5MBs!), along with some Joomla gems and memories, I found a list of Joomla forks I kept...
I bet you never know those existed. Some are still active, some are dead. Check them out...
And in case you don't know where this all started, check Mambo.
A common error most people do when finishing up a webiste with Joomla is forgetting to change their site's logo link from e.g. domain.com/index.php to just domain.com.
The community of K2 has spoken through the poll I got up yesterday on the frontpage of the K2 Community website. An email was previously sent to all our members letting them know of this poll, as well as the reasons we chose to resolve into such a poll.
Why we're not porting K2 to Joomla 1.6 (just yet), the life cycle of a release, Nooku Server and more
inBlog
IMPORTANT NOTICE: A poll is now setup in the K2 Community for people to voice their opinion more properly
First, some facts...
Joomla 1.6's life cycle is very short. Just 6 months. By July 2011, the Joomla team will end development and proceed to releasing Joomla v1.7.This is very disturbing for many big projects like K2, considering all the big changes that 1.6 has introduced in its framework (language files, content elements, classes, functions, ACL etc. etc.) and the unnecessary workload added (see language files going back to Joomla 1.0 days), especially for free extensions like K2, Virtuemart and many more...Many developers have expressed doubts about 1.6. Jen Kramer also nailed it in her recent blog post: Joomla 1.6 and Beyond: Should I upgrade? Should I build my new sites in it?
So did Andy Miller of RocketTheme fame on: Should I upgrade to Joomla 1.6?
Back to the title of this post...
If you run a popular Joomla (or WordPress, Drupalor or any other PHP based CMS) website on either a dedicated server or VPS running WHM/cPanel, chance is you may have stumbled upon performance issues at some point.
Although improving Joomla's performance is a task that requires in-depth analysis, I thought I'd just write a couple of words on improving one aspect of your site's performance quickly and efficiently: PHP execution by using the APC or APCu opcode caching modules. Keep in mind that APC is compatible with PHP up to version 5.3.x. APCu replaces APC for PHP versions 5.4.x or newer and it's currently under active development.
Since PHP 5.3.x is considered obsolete, I'll cover the steps to have APCu installed on your server. If you run PHP 5.3.x either consider updating to 5.5.x/5.6.x or follow the steps below making sure you replace any "apcu" reference with just "apc" (minus the "u").
Although improving Joomla's performance is a task that requires in-depth analysis, I thought I'd just write a couple of words on improving one aspect of your site's performance quickly and efficiently: PHP execution by using the APC or APCu opcode caching modules. Keep in mind that APC is compatible with PHP up to version 5.3.x. APCu replaces APC for PHP versions 5.4.x or newer and it's currently under active development.
Since PHP 5.3.x is considered obsolete, I'll cover the steps to have APCu installed on your server. If you run PHP 5.3.x either consider updating to 5.5.x/5.6.x or follow the steps below making sure you replace any "apcu" reference with just "apc" (minus the "u").
There have been endless discussions around how Joomla is developed and maintained. One thing is clear though: development is quite slow and new significant features for the end user have not yet been introduced since the Mambo days... It's one of the reasons we decided to build K2, so we could introduce more modern and popular features into Joomla now.
Here's an easy trick to replace the built-in Mootools library that comes in Joomla 1.5 with a compressed copy from Google AJAX Libraries API:
<!-- The following code goes into your template's index.php <head> tags, right before the <jdoc:include type="head" /> code block --><?php// Replace Mootools in Joomla with a compressed copy from Google AJAX Libraries API$document =&JFactory::getDocument();unset($document->_scripts[$this->baseurl . '/media/system/js/mootools.js']);?><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script><script type="text/javascript">google.load("mootools", "1.1.2");</script>There are 2 speed benefits by following this approach:
- We load a compressed copy of Mootools, so from around 73kb it drops to 18kb!
- We load Mootools from Google, thus our browser can simultaneously (in parallel) download Mootools along with the rest of our site's content.
It's a simple & easy trick we use on all our web projects, big or small. ;)