Joomla! Community Magazine™

The Problem: Testing software has been a huge challenge as long as software has been around. A big part of this is the simple mathematics of if / then statements.

From early Mambo days until today, Joomla! has constantly amended and extended functionality. With Joomla! 1.5, quality and user experience changed to the better, and it did so with version 2.5. Moving to GitHub has made it easier to contribute and to see what things different developers are working on. Now, the focus more and more goes to the next logical step: Automated tests.

As you may have directly experienced, in the registration form of a large number of websites, and in the most important such as Google or Yahoo for example, typing an account username immediately triggers the availability check of the choosen username, before the entire form is submitted. Let's see if it is possible to use the same technique on the registration form of Joomla! 2.5 based sites.

During the first week of March Joomla! Day Guatemala was took place, with many speakers and workshops. There were people who were very interested in Joomla! and web development, but also those who were particularly interested in the Joomla! Platform.

There’s a new release in the Joomla! Press series this week: Joomla! Programming by Mark Dexter and Louis Landry.

TP2 is the only extension that gives you the ability to see all of your module positions in site preview and use a drag-n-drop interface for adding and managing site modules in any position.

Clients grumble too often about a hard-to-use CMS.  The problem, often, is delivering to clients edit screens that are unchanged from how they come out-of-the-box.  We can do better. In this example we’ll be tailoring a complex edit screen into something streamlined for a particular client.  The technique shown here can be applied to any extension and for any client with specific needs.

With the Joomla! 2.5 release, a new search component has been included to improve the search engine in Joomla! sites. Based on JXtended's Finder, Smart Search is quite the powerful tool and can be used to improve search results and show the user exactly what they want. Out of the box, Smart Search will work for most core data, but third party developers will have to create their own Finder plugins to interact with Smart Search. Not to worry, I'll help you get started with that now!

When a website development project is ready to be delivered, the clients usually demand a customised built-in help system so that they know how to navigate through the loads of menu items and web pages in order to maintain and manage the content/site in the absence of the development team.  Implementing such a built-in help system is made easier by Joomla’s Administrator Menu module.

The purpose of this paper is to present WebSocket technology, included in the latest HTML5 specification, which allows much faster communication and dynamic communication server / client.