An Open Day

In 2009 I attended the Melbourne Joomla! Day. It was one of the most exciting Joomla! experiences I have ever had. The highlight was watching Rob Schley of JXtended talk about the future of Joomla! This year I missed the whole affair due to work commitments, which is a big shame.

However, I was delighted to watch the amazing Andrew Eddie give his Joomla 1.6 presentation on the Joomla! Community Blog. The post has the video of Andrew’s presentation embedded, and it’s a must watch for anyone who was unable to attend what sounds like an amazing day.

Andrew focuses largely on the new permissions system in Joomla! 1.6, what the experts call ACL (Access Control List). The big jump being the end to sections, being replaced by nested categories.

The immediate potential is obvious, the core Joomla! content type of articles will soon be super flexible and sophisticated. It will allow custom tuned access groups for categories and even specific articles.

But what excites me the most, is that this core technology can now be freely expanded into other Joomla! extensions.

For my own Joomla! website at crawl.net.au, we are very heavy users of two main extensions*:

1. EventList (the event management component that manages the venues and events on Crawl)
2. Labels (the tagging component that manages the artist name tags applied to the EventList events)

EventList on Crawl

EventList has many potential uses for a modern ACL base, which I am sure EventList and other Joomla! event extension users and developers are already discussing.

What I am most excited about is the potential to realise a long term goal of Crawl in allowing users to be able to take full ownership of their own “Venues”. Since we started Crawl, we have manually updated the website with events for Artist Run Initiatives (ARIs: usually art galleries, but often non-conventional art projects such as publications, nomad projects and most recently an art vending machine!).

We love doing this as it is our way of supporting ARIs in Australia, but it also clear that there is a real desire and community driven need to take ownership of these “Venues” and “Events”. Keeping this in mind, we have always wanted to be able to offer ARIs the option of taking ownership and managing their own space on Crawl. The ACL in Joomla! 1.6 is a massive step in making this possible.

Labels on Crawl

Whenever we post a new ARI event on Crawl, we tag the event with the artists, curators and writers names. This has been wonderful and powerful. Currently we have over three thousand artist names tagged on Crawl.

A possible next step is to open these artist tags (or Labels in the JXtended parlance) to the individual artists. This could allow them to add biographies, photos or links to their Artist Tag. This is functionality built into the powerful extension of Labels, but with the ACL in Joomla! 1.5 is not practical. But with the new ACL in Joomla! 1.6, things get interesting, very interesting.

If you have any thoughts on this that you would like to share, feel free to email me at nicholas@crawl.net.au.

10 Regarding ‘phoning home’ and PHP4/5 requirements
9 User Accounts extensible by Plugins
8 Save Triggers for Core Components
7 Modified Help System
6 Publishing dates handling improvement

Click on for the Final Five!

5 Expansions to the User Management System (Draft)
4 User Interface Copy, Move, Delete, Trash Consistency
3 Library Installer
2 Access Management in Joomla! 1.6
1 Improve SQL query for a speedy joomla 1.6

What a great list, Joomla 1.6 is looking to be a more polished and very slick update to 1.5 … wow.

If you are super jazzed about this list, check out the Top 50 accepted Joomla 1.6 White Papers at the Joomla! Forum: http://forum.joomla.org/viewforum.php?f=502.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that Joomal! has a bright and wonderful (occasionally arousing) future. Or as Andrew Eddie puts it,

“very, very exciting times.”