Discussion about : Joomla! 1.5 is on the Horizon ...

[mcbade]

Sunburst,

Is that CD a booting image?  I see images for Linux and Windows...  I'm on a MAC here :-)

Thanks,

-John

[duvien]

Sunburst,

Is that CD a booting image?  I see images for Linux and Windows...  I'm on a MAC here :-)

Thanks,

-John

Yes, it is an ISO image, all you need to do is burn the image with a CD writer. I've only tried the Windows version which allows you to run it while you are logged into Windows. As for the Linux version, i think that one is bootable of the CD so you may want to try that on your Mac. 

thanks,

[mcbade]

Hey my fellow "Joomla"ers...

Since fapeixoto was asking for my site URL, I thought I would make my reply general.  Forgive me for being slightly off topic but I want to give kudos where they are due.

Please let me say that I have received better support from this forum for Joomla than from software I have paid good money for.  I can't mention the company because I have bruised their sensabilities already in expecting I would get better support for my money than I have.

If anyone is interested in my humble little site that I have converted, (well, in the process of converting), from static to Joomla you are welcome to stop by.  I have only a modified template right now as I get the data in there.  I intend to do my own template soon as I get some bandwidth from my other responsibilities here in Japan.

I'm not doing much really...  Only trying to learn Japanese (half days M-F), be a full time missionary (that entails more than I have space for here :-), put together our new living quarters - a virtually empty place that needs "everything" and be the IT guy for the church here.  Oh, and they are asking if I might give some guitar lessons :-)  (I had to laugh at that one - Oh I can play - only helping with doing worship and in my "spare time" playing a little)  Actually, being a missionary in Japan has been a 20 year dream for us.  It's simply awesome.

I want to thank all who have been helping me get my head around Joomla.  I think it's going to really be a help to produce the new website for our church and the Japan wide disaster relief ministry here.

So, my humble beginning for my personal site is at: http://www.mcbade.com

Thanks!  You are "subarashii" すばらしい (wonderful) group.

-John

[fapeixoto]

What a great life!
All the best.

I'm sure that Joomla could help you make very good things. It's a wonderful tool. And it's becoming better everyday.

FaPeixoto

[siro]

One more question on the 1.5 release (or future releases even..)

Will Joomla one day support configurable user-fields? I would like to extend the fields a new registrant has to fill in. I.E.: i've been using community builder for this, but it would be great if it would be a Joomla supported feature.

For example: beside username, email and password I would like to configure a set of fields myself (Company name, Birthplace etc) and set what type of fields these are (dropdownlist, checkbox, text)


Regards,

Siro

[Asphyx]

While that would be desirable I think a more flexible option might be the ability to set an option to forward the user to another form or success message that could do this which would allow not only the ability to add forms items to a user query but also allow sites to send users to payment mechanisms, Site rule lists, etc...

I agree some flexability needs to be added to the registration forms but it needs more than just the ability to add fields...

I would like to display my privacy policy before they fill out the form, would like to set where they get sent after a successful signup, Give them a quick confirmation page of what they entered so they can look over the details and make any corrections and I'm sure membership sites would love the ability to send users to the payment form first before they were allowed to create users in the DB...

If the Devs continue on the shining path they have started on with the new APIs I would expect what will happen is there will be a function set up to enter users that you can call to in any custom form.
I think that would be easiest and most flexible and would not require them to code an entire form system into the CMS.
Which adding extra fields involves...It's a lot more than collecting the data it has to be saved somewhere...

[Jinx]

If the Devs continue on the shining path they have started on with the new APIs I would expect what will happen is there will be a function set up to enter users that you can call to in any custom form.
I think that would be easiest and most flexible and would not require them to code an entire form system into the CMS.
Which adding extra fields involves...It's a lot more than collecting the data it has to be saved somewhere...

That is indeed correct. We have talked about this already time just didn't prevent us to add it to 1.5. However, a JForm package is one of the things on my personal wish/todo list for a next version. Changes are that I will develop it in a seperate branch and make the package available to the developer community for testing and feedback and then integrate it into a future release once it is ready.

[Asphyx]

Glad to hear it Jinx....

And honestly I don't think it would have made sense to squeeze it into 1.5 anyway since if your going to redo the user system better to do it in conjunction with the proposed ACL enhancements than to shoe horn it into the current system and work the ACL around it. I expect ACL will require some ground up rewrites if you wanted to get to the section by section access levels (maybe I'm wrong)

Might as well do the user system in a unified manner

As I always say the wait is always worth if when it's done once and done right.

[Jinx]

I was actually just talking about a form package ...

[Asphyx]

LOL ok then consider this a feature request....
Put in some way to display the data input by the form on the website! so I can stop annoying Phil Taylor about doing it!
LOL

[kurtcms]

• Database abstraction/Multi database support

ACL: comes in 1.6
Multi database support: Implemented in 1.5 (at least in a basic level, the queries have not been optimized for other DBs)

I'm very interested to know the capability of v1.5 to support authentication and data access against an MS-SQL database. Here's the scenario we have right now. we're looking to build a web agent front end using Joomla to access our tour management (reservation and booking engine) application that runs on MS-SQL. our client's website will be running joomla and then their agents will want to login to take reservations. we want the ability to have them login and authenticate against our user database in MS-SQL.  then once they're inside we want them to be able to access pages built in Joomla that will use SQL queries we design that allow reading and writing of data to our MS-SQL database. we will use the rest of Joomla for other, non-reservation related content which can still live in Joomla.

will this be possible with v1.5 and if so, how soon?  we need to roll this project out to several large national clients in 60 days and I just need to know if Joomla will be the best route or if we will need to custom program it.

thank you to all of you wonderful people that continue to make Joomla an incredible reality.

Kurt

[Jinx]

Kurt,

U will be able to use the authentication plugins system in Joomla! 1.5 to authenticate your users against the MS SQL datasource. Buidling your own plugin is very simple, more info can be found on our development wiki.

Joomla! 1.5 is capable of running queries against any database, the core supports MySQL and MySQLi, however u could easily built a MS SQL database driver for your project and use this driver inside your custom component.

Hope this helps u to make a decision.

[AmyStephen]

Joomla! 1.5 is capable of running queries against any database, the core supports MySQL and MySQLi, however u could easily built a MS SQL database driver for your project and use this driver inside your custom component.

SWEET!!!! That opens things, up, doesn't it? Thanks much.

[siro]

thanks Yinx for the information on JForms and userfields. Can't wait for it to be released... Right now I'm using combuilder, and don't get me wrong, it's a great component, but it does have it's limitations integrationwise.

[brian]

Sunburst,

Is that CD a booting image?  I see images for Linux and Windows...  I'm on a MAC here :-)

Thanks,

-John

Yes, it is an ISO image, all you need to do is burn the image with a CD writer. I've only tried the Windows version which allows you to run it while you are logged into Windows. As for the Linux version, i think that one is bootable of the CD so you may want to try that on your Mac. 

thanks,

Sadly the linux version is for the i386 (and compatible) family of processors and will NOT work on a MAC.

Hopefully one day I will be able to create a mac version

Brian

[kurtcms]

Kurt,

U will be able to use the authentication plugins system in Joomla! 1.5 to authenticate your users against the MS SQL datasource. Buidling your own plugin is very simple, more info can be found on our development wiki.

wow that's awesome and great news. that will make life MUCH easier because I would really like to use Joomla for this project. how soon could we start working with 1.5 to test this?  is the current version stable enough or do we need to wait a few weeks?

also, how will we handle user permissions once they'e authenticated?  authenticating is one thing but if those users aren't defined in Joomla, I'm not sure how their access will be defined. does this mean we will have to copy users over to Joomla? I really hope not.  I would like to be able to pass through the fine-grained permissions we have in our application to Joomla but I'm not sure if that is possible given the current ACL.  we control what buttons, menu items and screens in our application users have access to.

Joomla! 1.5 is capable of running queries against any database, the core supports MySQL and MySQLi, however u could easily built a MS SQL database driver for your project and use this driver inside your custom component.

great. I'll talk to our programmer about this because if its that simple then we can roll this project much more quickly than I thought.  has anyone created an MS-SQL driver already or will we be the first ones?  I noticed there was an alpha for something like this on the forge that I downloaded but since it was somewhat programmer-ish I haven't really gotten into it yet.

if need be, we could create this and submit it back to the community.

Hope this helps u to make a decision.

yes, Jinx, this made it really easy.  this is an incredible community and I'm really stoked about moving our custom projects forward with Joomla.

thank you,

Kurt

[Tonie]

For the latest development version, the nightlies from SVN are the way to go: http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/17/60/#nightly.

If all goes according to plan (read --> enough time), the first Beta version of Joomla should be out at the end of this month. This will be a good moment to start testing.

Please note that a more fine grained ACL will not make it into Joomla 1.5, the current roadmap can be found here: http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/23/61/

I personally haven't seen anybody who has build a MSSQL driver yet, the system is still really new.

[stingrey]

Regards Database independence, this may also be of interest from our Residenbt Database expert (Mitch Pirtle):
http://dev.joomla.org/component/option, ... 3/#more-83

Basically creating Database drivers will be much easier in 1.5, however, there is still the problem of the MYSQL specfiic SQL queries used in Joomla core - including 1.5

[kurtcms]

For the latest development version, the nightlies from SVN are the way to go: http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/17/60/#nightly.

If all goes according to plan (read --> enough time), the first Beta version of Joomla should be out at the end of this month. This will be a good moment to start testing.

that sounds great to me. that will work with our timeframe.

Please note that a more fine grained ACL will not make it into Joomla 1.5, the current roadmap can be found here: http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/23/61/

I personally haven't seen anybody who has build a MSSQL driver yet, the system is still really new.

apparently there is one in the extensions directory. http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/

just downloaded it but haven't tested it yet.

thanks,

Kurt

[kurtcms]

Regards Database independence, this may also be of interest from our Residenbt Database expert (Mitch Pirtle):
http://dev.joomla.org/component/option, ... 3/#more-83

Basically creating Database drivers will be much easier in 1.5, however, there is still the problem of the MYSQL specfiic SQL queries used in Joomla core - including 1.5

thanks for the info. where will the MySQL-specific SQL bite me?

thanks,

Kurt

[Asphyx]

Question to the devs and Kurt on approach...

IS there any reason why he has to run the entire site off of the MS SQL as opposed to just running his custom component off of it?

Other than the user access issue which really would require ACL upgrades anyway so he could distuinguish unregged, regged and database access...

It's not as elegant as everything in one DB but it would be an extra layer of protection as well...

[Jinx]

Question to the devs and Kurt on approach...

IS there any reason why he has to run the entire site off of the MS SQL as opposed to just running his custom component off of it?

Actually if he wants to keep his development time short and still allow for his system to be upgradable he will need to follow the approach u suggest. His Joomla! installation will need to run on MySQL and his custom component will query a foreign MS SQL database.

The reason for this is that lot's of  SQL queries in the system are too MySQL specific and would need changing if he would want to run with a fullblow MS SQL solution. This is one of the reasons why we can't run Joomla! on different database yet. A first step was the creating of the database driver concept and second one is making sure that all queries are generating ANSI SQL correct code, probably we will need to introduce a JQuery class that takes part of the query building based on the choosen driver as there are too many difference between database drivers.

Kurt's work could be beneficial to as at it can learn as alot about the problem involved in writing Queries for MS SQL.

[Red Shift]

If I install the stable version now then upgrade to 1.5 whenits stable will i lose all the data or will it still be able to access the same db tables?
*sorry for the very newbie question*
Thanks

[Tonie]

For 1.5, you will (most likely) have to do a new install, after which the old content can be copied to the new install. One of the reason for this, is that 1.5 will  support UTF, and that is a big change from a database perspective.

[Asphyx]

Just adding to tonies comment the short answer is no you won't lose content but you will have to import the content from the old DB to the new!

[Red Shift]

Thank you both for the answers, will this be complicated to do? databases i do not know so well, to import data from one db to another i have only used a tool that came with the installer of the program i was using... will there be an importing tool with the install? Im sure there will be instructions with the 1.5 download but just trying to gauge ahead of time if it will be over my head, Thanks!
(btw if there is a more appropriate place for me to post questions do let me know)

[AmyStephen]

Red shift -

The devs will take care of us! It should be very, very easy -- very probably part of the installation.

BTW - I notice you have 4 posts. I *love* to find new people and recommend they check out the resources in the link, below, in my signature line. We have found people who go through this material *carefully* are much more successful and far less frustrated using Joomla! than those who do not.

So, if you are indeed new, check it out! People have assembled some amazing guides that helped me six months ago when I started, too!

Good luck!
Amy

[Asphyx]

Red - the Devs are very good about these things when the time comes...

I can only guess but it seems logical that the installer or some extra program you run after the installer will ask you for info to log into your old database so it can retrieve and import all your old content and settings

But like I said how they will do it I don't know I'm just guessing at the most logical way it can be done

[w1x]

what about the templates modules etc? will we have to re-install all of them?

[Asphyx]

what about the templates modules etc? will we have to re-install all of them?

My first guess is no you won't have to re-install you would simply copy the module and component folders (or parts of them that are not part of the core) and they will work, but again this is only a guess....

The biggest question regarding 1.5 is will all past modules and components actually work with it....
Devs have said 80-90% backward compatability so this may not be a problem at all....

It would be a good idea to check the components and modules you want to use on the extentions site to see what they are listed as being compatible with...there are many already available that claim 1.1/1.5 compatibility....