My Joomla News

Following the adventures of Nicholas as he continues to use Joomla!® to develop Artist Run Initative website Crawl.net.au

October 16, 2008 • 11:57 am 11

Getting MyJoomlaNews.com domain approved through OSM

Note: Permission to re-produce all material here has been generously given by Open Source Matters Inc. (OSM)

I though this might be of interest to other members of the Joomla! community, as I suspect that there are other websites that use the Joomla! trademark, and may not be aware of how to go about obtaining the correct permissions to do so safely and respectfully.

A couple of months ago (long after starting this blog I am embarrassed to say), I submitted MyJoomlaNews.com for permission to use the Joomla trademark within a domain. You can read the form at this link: http://www.opensourcematters.org/content/view/98/68/.

A couple of weeks later, I received this reply:

Hi,

We’ve approved your request for use of the Joomla! name in  your domain http://myjoomlanews.com/. Please note that this approval is not transferable or exclusive and is contingent on continuing compliance with all other OSM trademark policies.

On your site, please make sure that the first prominent use of the name Joomla! has the trademark symbol (R in a circle). Also, include the following staement: ” The Joomla!(R)  name is used under a limited license from Open Source Matters the worldwide trademark holder.”

Please make sure to keep us up to date with any changes.

Best wishes,

Elin Waring

President

Open Source Matters

It was great to hear back from OSM knowing that I was acting in good faith with the OSM organisation. But I did have one small thing that I wanted to clarify, so I replied:

 

Hi Elin,

Thank you for your email, and for approving my request to use the Joomla! name within my domain. I fully understand the conditions under which this approval is based upon and will comply fully with them.

I would like one small clarification though, does this approval require the ® symbol to be placed next to instances of the Joomal! logo?

Finally, would it be possible to republish these email correspondences on my blog (myjoomlanews.com)? I understand if you would prefer me not to, and I would respect those wishes, but perhaps it could be educational for other members of the Joomla! community to see how the request proposal functions.

All the best,

Nicholas Hudson-Ellis

After this, Elin graciously replied with this:

If the use is of one of our logos that has the symbol it must be left as is. The first use of the name on your site must have the symbol. 

My basic rule is not to disclose licensing agreements we have made with specific peope/companies/sites such as yours. What would be the context in which you would want to publish?  I’m certainly happy to have people know how simple (although slow) we make it to get permissions.  

Elin

 

After seeing that I would be re-producing the emails in a positive context, Elin graciously consented to have me re-produce the emails.

The process above might be unknown to many people in the community, it certainly was to myself. But it is nonetheless very important to work together to protect Joomla! and it’s trademarks for everyone.

Filed under: Blog News ,

August 26, 2008 • 9:55 pm 4

Can Azrul save Community on Joomla?

8 hours ago on azrul posted on twitter a tasty treat about a new product his company is working on, and a link to a teaser website (http://jomsocial.com).

The product is JomSocial, a social networking component for Joomla! According to the webite, JomSocial will include the following features:

  • Custom user profile
  • Personal messaging system
  • Join and create interactive user groups
  • Friend-buddy system

This alone would be powerful and exciting, but if you look at the sample image in the banner on the website, there is another top menu option called Apps. If this reffers to a system of plugins to integrate with other components, then JomSocial could really shake things up.

For those who don’t know, Azrul is the maker of MyBlog and JomComment which are some of the most widely used components in the Joomla! Community.

I am personally a big fan of their work, and use both components above on my main Joomla! website. If Azrul can bring the same elegance to JomSocial as they do to MyBlog and JomComment, we are in for a treat.

It is also worth noting that the Azrul team has been very good with prividing Community Builder plugins for their existing components. This is perhaps why they have developed JomSocial, to create what they couldn’t get in CB.

Links:

Filed under: Uncategorized

August 20, 2008 • 1:23 am 3

Icons for your website through the iPhone

I just spent a while looking for a way to change the default screen-grap icon for bookmarked web pages using the iPhone. I finally discovered it through google, but thought it would be worth posting here, as Apple seems to have deleted the official instructions page.

I finally found something close at the CartoonBarry blog:

Step 1: Create custom icons that are 57×57 and save them as PNG files. They can be larger, but Apple will scale them for you.

Step 2: Rename the file to apple-touch-icon.png

Step 3: Upload them to your root directory on your server.

STOP – what if you don’t have access to your root directory? Well, you can add a <link> element similar to <link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/customIcon.png”/> within the <head> element of the page.

Well, this is pretty good but a bit misleading. You can’t follow the instructions and then cut and paste. If you need to create the icon and make it usable, then the code will need to reflect the link and the image source file. For example, this is the code that I inserted into my header:

<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/apple-touch-icon.png”/>

Notice that the link section and the image source have the same name. If you copy this code and insert it into your header on your template’s index.php file, it should work. This does mean however that you can change the code to remove any mention of Apple (sort of). For example you could use this code:

<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/medium-favicon.png”/>

And it will work!

This is the icon that I use on Crawl.net.au

Crawl.net.au iPhone icon

Crawl.net.au iPhone icon

If you are trying this out on an iPhone, you will notice that the version of Mac OS X on the iPhone will automatically apply the shiny filter and the rounded corners to the image. You only need to provide a square original image.

One last thing to mention is that the iPhone takes the title of the website as the name of the bookmark. So if your Joomla! website uses a longish slogan on it’s homepage, it will truncate it. I haven’t worked out a way to get around this yet. It would be brilliant if you could force the iPhone to substitute a different title, that would be brilliant!

If anyone knows the secret, spread the word! Although, I doubt it, as even the Apple and Google websites do not seem to do this.

Filed under: Other, Search Engine Optimisation , , ,

July 9, 2008 • 12:07 am 2

Joomla Juice Returns!

The long absent Joomla! podcast Joomla! Juice has returned! The new episode is about Nooku from the folks at Joomlatools. Nooku is a new multi-lingual tool for Joomla.

You can go to the Joomla! Juice website here, or subscribe via iTunes through this RSS feed.

Filed under: Uncategorized

June 24, 2008 • 6:21 pm 4

Image of Anahita

Photograph taken by Rastin Mehr (Aristocrat)

This image was taken by Rastin Mehr (Aristocrat), one of the talented developers at RMD Studio.

The image shows the Persian goddess Anahita, which clearly was the inspiration for the naming of their in development Joomla! Social Networking project. Rastin describes some of the backstory of this image on his flickr page:

The ancient Persian Goddess “Aredvi Sura Anahita” the divinity of Water associated with Fertility, Healing, and Wisdom in the universe. She is also associated with War, Protection, and Peace. Anahita means “the immaculate one”.

(The) Sculpture was first created by my grand uncle Jallil Ziopour. He was a Fine Arts university professor, cubist artist, and anthropologist. I think he reproduced the sculpture of Anahita based on his many findings during his excavations in Iran (not too sure which area exactly. ) He gave me that print in person when I was 6 or 7 years old.

Click here to read the full story, very interesting.

Image above Released by Rastin under Creative Commons (some rights reserved). Click here to read license.

Filed under: Uncategorized ,

About this Blog

This blog follows my experiences using the Joomla!® CMS as I continue to develop the website Crawl.net.au. This is an unofficial Joomla!® news blog run by a fan of the Joomla! project. Here you will find news and updates about future Joomla! releases as well as third party addons. The Joomla!® name is used under a limited license from Open Source Matters the worldwide trademark holder.

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