JandBeyond - around the joomla! world in 72 hours - may 30th to june 1st, wiesbaden, germany

A "round table" session about how to improve business, making commercial Joomla! extensions that are licensed under the GPL (to be listed in the JED). It is intended as information sharing; so, not just one speaker, but input from various participants. Bring along your own examples and questions. It is not a discussion about wether the GPL is necessary for extensions or whether commercial GPL is possible; we will just positively describe businessmodels and give some examples of how to earn a living developing Joomla! extensions that are distributed under GPL.

At this moment (February 2010) we are having a good discussion about this topic on the general-dev-list.
We will start this session with a concise presentation of the results (and questions) that arose from that discussion.

• Ninjaboard, a brand new Jooma forum by Ninjaforge, with some unique new features to make your life easier, including a design that adapts to your Joomla template.
• Anahita Social Engine, the mother of all social network applications, that allows for unlimited control over your community site
• Nooku Content, the multilingual extension with advanced SEO and content management features.
• ... and more!

Nooku Framework is getting quite a following among developers, but what does that mean for Joomla system integrators? Today, all Joomla extensions are very inflexible, especially if they do only 80% of what you need. If they don't do what you want, you either have to hack them (bad idea) or try to persuade the developer to include the feature.

The creators of Nooku Framework, Johan Janssens (J1.5 Lead Architect) and Mathias Verraes (DOCman Lead Developer), are not just going to talk about it. They'll prove it by showing how to  make an extension do what you want. 

Finally you can give your customers the full 100% they asked for.

• A near-zero-code MVC,
• Domain Driven Design
• Object Relational Mapping
• Out of the box security features
• Extensibility through command chains, decorators, dependency injection...

And not to forget extreme re-usability: already a number of components are being built that can be plugged right into your own extension, such as user management, trash management and taxonomy (tagging and categories)

Research has shown that page load time can have a significant effect  on visitor retention rates, yet few web designers optimise their templates for performance.  Although a typical Joomla website has quite reasonable performance "out-of-the-box", there is much that can be done given an understanding of how template design affects performance.

In this session you will learn how to build Joomla templates to maximise performance across all current browsers.  You will also see how to use various tools to help you analyse and quantify performance.  These same techniques can be used to improve the performance of existing templates.  They are not difficult to apply and in a number of real-world deployments, page-load times have been reduced to a quarter of their pre-tuned levels for typical pages with a variety of image, CSS and JavaScript resources.

Some coding is required, but all example code will be made available for download after the conference, together with all the slides, so you can focus on the message without having to take notes during the session.

How to make your extension up to 10 times faster and ready for heavy load by using advanced caching

• Joomla caching typology explained
• Which cache type is most suitable for your extension and when to use them
• There is more than file cache - alternative caching drivers
• Case study - how we made an extension that is getting faster with every page access and performs better under heavy load than on empty testserver
• Caching improvements in Joomla 1.6.
• Prevent abuse - caching safety - how to close the door to DOS attacks
• Tips and tricks

Has it happened to you that after reading the official documentation or a book you started developing your next Joomla extension but were stopped by an issue that you couldn’t resolve? Have you ever thought over the accuracy of your MVC structures? Have you ever doubted the approaches you use to develop your components, modules and plug-ins? Have you ever thought of optimizing the code of your extension and make it better? If you can answer “yes” at least on one of the above questions, it’s worth attending.

This training will be using the “Don’t Do This and Be Happy” approach. You will learn what not to do in order to succeed with your next Joomla extension from the development perspective. The material is based on author’s personal experience and typical mistakes that many Joomla developers do in their extensions.

Key Points

• Sharing the experience of developing Joomla extensions.
• 5% of theory, 95% of practice.
• Actual examples of solving practical problems: from choosing the files and folders structure to advices on building huge components with many specific requirements.
• Joomla components will be the main focus.
• By the end of the training you’ll learn how to develop your components using the best practices in the web development world.

Click the title of this introduction to see what exactly will be covered!

Background

Have you ever written a component for the Joomla community or a specific client and found that your users keep wanting new features or that you could use the component for another client if only you could add some new features?

This is the situation with JEvents, the event calendar for Joomla.  Clients continually want new features or layouts that are specific to them, event registration, Jomsocial/Community Builder integration, custom fields, private events, tagging, comments integration, paid event submission etc.

Rather than build a huge application that includes lots of features that are not relevant to most users - these special features have been implemented as addons to JEvents.  

How is this done?

In this session I would describe how this has been done in JEvents (using a combination of Joomla plugins, innovative data structures and extending the Joomla view classes). 

I'll also describe how the same approach could be adopted to the Joomla core content type to allow, for example, additional custom fields, special access rules, paid content submission, linkages to other data types in Joomla.  In essence incorporating an extensible CCK into Joomla content.

I'd also like to encourage a discussion with attendees about alternative approaches and the strengths and drawbacks of this type of extensible component development.

While Joomla! is powerful in it's CMS features, many people have looked in other directions when it comes to e-commerce. One of the most popular solutions to build a robust and flexible e-commerce site is Magento. With the MageBridge extension built by Yireo this e-commerce solution can be integrated within Joomla! on all levels needed.

MageBridge first of all handles user synchronization, Single Sign On and authentication. But there's much more to really integrate Magento into Joomla!: MageBridge also integrates things on a visual level: All visual Magento blocks can be re-used in Joomla!, while they can easily be maintained using Joomla!'s Menu Manager and Module Manager. Also, the Joomla! search functionality will extend it's search to look for Magento products as well. But these integrations are just the beginning.

Let us be honest! You can make everything with Joomla! Yes, you can - the only limitation is time and your imagination.

This workshop is for all developers that have just installed Joomla and have never looked under the hood.

Have you worked with Drupal, Typo3 or Wordpress? Or have you coded your websites just alone? Are you considering using the JoomlaCMS for your next project?
Then this workshop will be for you!