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.

Australian Mathematical Science Institute
c/- The University of Melbourne
111 Barry Street, Carlton

You can read more about the agenda here, and if you are a Joomla! user in Melbourne, you can let people know you are attending here!

Joomla! 1.5 was the most talked about topic, and everyone just can’t wait for it. It’s certainly made me re-think my priorities and what I might be able to do to help towards the goal of getting 1.5 out as soon as possible.

It feels like a long time ago now, I was in a different job, and was growing a moustache. I had to run from work to get to the cafe on time.

It was a strange afternoon, exhilarating being around so many Joomla! users, but also slightly daunting. Everyone had a business card, and their own web design company.

These days I feel a little more confident using Joomla!, and am looking forward to other community days. I really should get my stuff together and make a visit to the Joomla! Melbourne Users Group.

Finally, here is a picture that Brad posted of the day, I’m somewhere in the middle, just look for the ridiculous moustache, it no longer exists. The moustach that is, not me in the photo…