Discussion about : Joomla! First — A Developer Network Portal Raises Standards

[stingrey]

In reference to this:

Joomla! First — A Developer Network Portal Raises Standards
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,35804.0.html

[Mohammed]

Great work , core team and developers
this really sounds cool and gives a great impulse to joomla project

Good luck

[brad]

Great work!

Especially the 1.1 Dev Team.. Jinx and the guys have done a great job

[Beat]

Deep respect and big congratulations to the whole Joomla! core development team.

Having looked quite deeply into 1.1 svn these last nights and up to 1.1 alpha 2, to do some hands-on Backwards-Compatibility (BC) tests with Johan and Louis, I have to say:

• Great work on making the Joomla! 1.1 system architecture extremely professionally coded: clean, great potentials built-in
• Rock-Solid implementation: never had a bad crash, only some smaller bugs, which will be easily fixed
• A user-interface which is almost identical to Joomla! 1.0, with subtle improvements, not disorienting users
• A fabulous Backwards-Compatibility, given the completely new and different engine

Having adapted upcoming Community Builder 1.0 stable to run Joomla 1.1, and debugged with Johan and Louis the last BC issues during this adaptation, I have to say:

8) You guys rock ! You did a backwards-compatible completely new release of Joomla!, which is much better than the earlier foreseen "5.0", while keeping the compatibility.

Warning: great times ahead !!!

[AmyStephen]

I am SO excited!!! Thanks everyone!

[pointri]

Whew.  I'm glad Beat was one of the first to say that the framework thus far isn't greatly affecting backwards compatability.

Took a quick look through the developers' documentation and it's everything and more that I had expected.  This will make for a great resource for those (like me ) who are looking for a deeper understanding of what makes Joomla tick, and ways to give back at least some of the time and effort that Joomla and its 3PD projects have saved me in a number of projects.  Upward and onward!

[The One]

Sounds really good, can't wait to see more. Good job all!

[AMU]

*thumb up* :-)

[TheSaint]

Props to all the little "busy bees" that are working in the background making these great changes happen. Thank you for all your outstanding efforts!

[focalguy]

Awesome! Look forward to learning even more on the new portal in addition to these forums.

Thanks again for all the work team!

[TomT]

What a fine way to start a new week. Of course I'm thrilled about 1.1, but personally I think the new developers exchange is of the highest importance. Since the start of Joomla the quality of third party add-ons has allready improved significantly. The new structure will take Joomla to the highest level.

So once again: THANKS, Tom

[maxim_86ualb2]

well we all have been waiting for this for so long now... at last joomla with the fish .... now all the offitial sites can go live with joomla

[antoniosdv]

Hey, really great job!

This is the fact that the joomla professionals developers were waiting for a long time.

The object oriented framework is a great thing.

[miki89]

the Developer Network is very beautifull and interesting...  like all what you do, of course 

congratulations to the Dev Team!

[mosey]

I'm very excited to read about the release of the new portal although I'm only an end user/admin. Thanks for all the work! The backwards compatibility part was definitely one of the key issues I was wondering about, so am very glad to hear that it's all fine

[akede]

well we all have been waiting for this for so long now... at last joomla with the fish .... now all the offitial sites can go live with joomla

Hey Maxim,

it's on it's way. I'm also waiting for 1.1 in order to get the best integration between the Fish and Joomla! with UTF-8 support ;-). You'll find more information on that on dev.portal soon.

Cheers

Alex

[maxim_86ualb2]

well we all have been waiting for this for so long now... at last joomla with the fish .... now all the offitial sites can go live with joomla

Hey Maxim,

it's on it's way. I'm also waiting for 1.1 in order to get the best integration between the Fish and Joomla! with UTF-8 support ;-). You'll find more information on that on dev.portal soon.

Cheers

Alex

I know that is what I was doing

[Beat]

I'm very excited to read about the release of the new portal although I'm only an end user/admin. Thanks for all the work! The backwards compatibility part was definitely one of the key issues I was wondering about, so am very glad to hear that it's all fine :)

The backwards compatibility is indeed fabulous, considering that the whole engine running  Joomla! has been re-factored.

There are very few fundamental changes, most of which that I welcome warmly, which will need slight adaptations on some components. These changes are backwards-compatible with Joomla 1.0/Mambo 4.5.

Here are the ones that we have spotted (and chosen not to correct for backwards compatibility at this stage):

• Global scope: For security enhancement reasons and better encapsulation reasons, the components are not anymore just included from the main index.php, but called from a function. Thus their variables scope is not the global scope anymore.
  This means that variables created in the main part of a component, which are not declared as "global" before creation belong to the component's main execution, and are not accessible as global from the components functions.
  The adaptation is trivial: just add one line in the begin of the component: "global ...." enumerating the global variables of the component, and the ones of Joomla it is using.
• Global parameters in variables: By default URL parameters are not translated anymore into globals of same name, but should be accessed the standard way.
  Here too, the change is trivial: instead of looking directly at for instance at $form, do first a $form=mosGetParam( $_REQUEST, 'reportform'); .
  This will prevent SQL injection attacks by the way, as mosGetParam does escaping even with magicquotes off.
• Start of changes in ACL: The tables structure of the used phpGACL has changed slightly, due to an update to latest phpGACL.
  The $acl->.... methods remain backwards compatible, so components which do not access ACL tables wildly are ok.
• Modules path: Each module is installed in its own sub-directory, like components, meaning if they have images or other files, the path changes.
• Plugins: The mambots have been renamed to joomla plugins, as well as the directory, so same remark applies there.

This list is probably not complete, might need adjustments, and should probably go into the new http://dev.joomla.org portal.

So overall, the backwards compatibility is excellent, but not granted without small changes for all existing components, modules and mambots. 3PD are encouraged to download Joomla! 1.1 alpha 2 now, and to adapt their extensions to Joomla! 1.1 now. These adaptations can keep them backwards compatible to Joomla! 1.0, avoiding to have to mange two versions .

Hope these indications will help other 3PDs

If you see other things, please add them to my list, and/or add these to the official list

[Vimes]

A couple more things worth pointing out:

"Changes to Configuration Values
This method of accessing variables should greatly reduce the possibility for injection problems from the request. For backward compatibility, before we render the components we are extracting the globals from the JRegistry into component scope as $mosConfig_ variables, but this concept is deprecated and we STRONGLY urge you to change your code to the new format."

http://dev.joomla.org/component/option, ... 0/#more-10

The way I've approached this is by including one of my standard files right at the start and doing a function_exists(josURL). Depending on whether it exists or not then I can call one set of variables (a la $mosConfig_live_site) or another. This probably isn't the best choice but it'll do until I can get Jomres to actually install on v1.1 & do more testing.

The other one that jumped out at me was that actual creation of josURL, but I can't find a link for that at the moment, it's probably buried deep somewhere, I'll post it here if I find it.

In trying to maintain some backward compatability I suspect that I'll be creating a lot of function name substitution, but in & of itself that's not a bad thing.

[Predator]

A couple more things worth pointing out:

"Changes to Configuration Values
This method of accessing variables should greatly reduce the possibility for injection problems from the request. For backward compatibility, before we render the components we are extracting the globals from the JRegistry into component scope as $mosConfig_ variables, but this concept is deprecated and we STRONGLY urge you to change your code to the new format."

http://dev.joomla.org/component/option, ... 0/#more-10

Using this will improve the security a lot

The way I've approached this is by including one of my standard files right at the start and doing a function_exists(josURL). Depending on whether it exists or not then I can call one set of variables (a la $mosConfig_live_site) or another. This probably isn't the best choice but it'll do until I can get Jomres to actually install on v1.1 & do more testing.

The other one that jumped out at me was that actual creation of josURL, but I can't find a link for that at the moment, it's probably buried deep somewhere, I'll post it here if I find it.

Is here:
http://dev.joomla.org/index.php?option= ... elines:ssl

[Vimes]

Cheers matey.

It might be worth starting a thread for developers where we can list exactly what's changed between the two versions, in nice plain simple language. The API is all very well but most of it is double dutch, and I've found the bloggs on dev.joomla.org the most useful. I'm trying to retain as much backward compatability between J1.1 & J1.x and a list like this will be invaluable.

[eyezberg]

Back from a week out on the slopes; welcomed by a great news: dev portal + alpha are out!
Now why don't you guys get a week off before finalizing 1.1?

A question about the comments: what happens after you submit something there, does it get modded before publishing?
Asking this as there is no feedback at all when you submit..

Thanks to all.

[Predator]

Back from a week out on the slopes; welcomed by a great news: dev portal + alpha are out!
Now why don't you guys get a week off before finalizing 1.1?

A question about the comments: what happens after you submit something there, does it get modded before publishing?
Asking this as there is no feedback at all when you submit..

Thanks to all.

To prevent spam the comments need to get aproved, there will be no censoring, this is only to protect the comments for spamming.

You are right maybe i should add a message to the system like:

Thanks for your comment, the comment will get aproved soon

Or something like this.

[leolam]

Back from a week out on the slopes;

thought the olympics were just starting 

[Predator]

A question about the comments: what happens after you submit something there, does it get modded before publishing?
Asking this as there is no feedback at all when you submit..

Have add a message after the submit

[eyezberg]

Hey Marko, geh'n Bier trinken!
It's Sunday! That wa fast, impressive!

[Tonie]

A few have indeed taken a few days off after the alpha. Way needed (and deserved) seeing the work that has been done.

[Jinx]

I'm back in virtual-joomla-town, took a week off after 4 months hard work on 1.1 Going back at it today 

[Beat]

I'm back in virtual-joomla-town, took a week off after 4 months hard work on 1.1 Going back at it today 

Welcome back, Johan, you've well deserved the triple of that vacations ! Relax for another two weeks

[newart]

This DevNet Portal sounds Great for me! I'm very happy to see another good point for us... well, I've only a question that is why using WordPress? I know it, yes, It's useful, oh yeah... but in our official CMS Joomla! 

I know we have in our core system NO comment feature (yes, I'd like to have got a comment one) but I really dislike to see anything else than Joomla! I mean that I like to see 3d party components or whatever we need but I wonder... where is our "marketing" strategy?