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Knocking at Your Door

Getting a Grip on the Next Release

Joomla! 1.5

Joomla! 1.5 Knocking At Your Door Cover

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Joomla! 1.5 Knocking At Your Door

Getting a Grip on the Next Release
by Mitchell Pirtle

Let Joomla! core developer Mitch Pirtle take you through a quick tour of the advancements in the latest update to the award winning content management system. You will see the new front end editing interface, as well as the much-needed changes to the back end administrator interface.

Introduction
Last time I wrote for the International PHP Magazine (IPM), we (IPM) were still in print, and we (Joomla!) were still called Mambo. How things have changed! Even more change is afoot, with the impending release of Joomla! 1.5, and several new and exciting initiatives set to come from the IPM stable. This article will outline and demonstrate some of the most important improvements in Joomla!, from a developer perspective.

Joomla!, please remember that this is the same award winning team that made Mambo so special. Joomla! 1.0.0 was essentially the next maintenance release of the Mambo 4.5.2 series, with some goodies added for measure. I am not familiar with the team that presently works on Mambo, and do not track their progress. But it is safe to say that you have two completely independent projects, run by completely independent teams, and with decidedly different roadmaps and philosophies. With the 1.5 release, all compatibility attempts with Joomla! and Mambo come to an end, as not only have we made significant changes in our evolution, but the new Mambo team has also progressed on their own path. If you were wondering when it was no longer possible to mix and match components written for Mambo/Joomla!, wonder no more now is that time.

First, an Update
Back in August there were some events that triggered the split, which of course we like to refer to as the rebranding of Mambo to Joomla!. It is beyond the scope of this article to outline the events that lead to this happening, but it is important for everyone to know who Joomla! is, and what happened to Mambo. The entire Mambo teams developers, documentation writers, forum moderators, system administrators, PR and advocacy teams, and language translators decided in unison that this switch was required to protect the relationship between the developers and the community, and ensure that there would be no more commercial attempts to manipulate the project. So most folks are not aware of the totality of that agreement, or that it was in complete unanimity that we decided to rebrand. It was the most peaceful option for us, and the entire crew agreed with the plan. So when you look at the low version numbers of

The International Community Speaks

Back at the Joomla! Core Developer Summit in October, it was brought to our attention, in a rather painful fashion, that international support in Joomla! was a critical shortcoming; and if we wanted our software to be internationally viable we needed to focus all our efforts to supporting a more multilingual audience. We shelved our grand plans (more on that later) for the next release, and focused instead on meeting the communitys needs. The first step was to implement UTF-8 characterset support throughout the core. UTF-8 is also known as unicode, and

International PHP Magazine 06.2006

Cover Story Joomla! 1.5 Knocking At Your Door

supports multibyte charactersets, right-to-left languages, and others. With an aggressive schedule, we set out to implement UTF-8 support as quickly as possible. Our expected delivery date was within a few weeks, in November. This effort was frustrating when we learned that not only was the UTF-8 support going to require a lot of refactoring of the existing core, but that there were two major issues: supporting both PHP4 and PHP5 required totally different approaches, and the reliance on third-party libraries that Joomla! depended on were also unable to support UTF-8. Some libraries had to be completely removed, and we recreated them from scratch, just so we could support this requirement; and other libraries were replaced with still other libraries as well. Once the groundwork for this effort was underway, there was a period where the localization teams were winding through the different translations to make sure that new API calls were supported with their language files. While this was happening, the developers decided to refactor some areas that badly needed it as the UTF-8 requirement forced them to refactor the core anyway, it was logical to take care of some architectural shortcomings of the existing core. developers had the flexibility to do just what they wanted, instead of banging on a bunch of procedural code to make one site behave the way they wanted, in a very manual and error-prone fashion that made upgrades nearly impossible. It is completely true that you could say the Joomla! content management system was created with the Joomla! Framework. But enough history lessons already! Lets get to the new Joomla!

First Impressions
The new template is called rhuk_milkyway, and is brought to you by the same developer that produced the default for the 1.0.x series as well as the 4.5.x series when we were Mambo, Andy Miller. See Figure 1.

The Tipping Point

It was at this moment that some very important decisions were made that ultimately affected the delivery of 1.5 which back then was just called 1.1, as it was not considered a major effort. The first big decision was to refactor the colossal and bloated joomla.php. This bloated file was one monolithic pile of procedural PHP that was parsed for each and every single page that was delivered to the browser. This exercise started out innocently enough, with significant time spent just breaking out the code into separate classes, and using many OO patterns to simplify the rendering process of content. The intent was to make it easier on developers, but the added bonus was performance enhancements. The effect was due to Joomla! no longer parsing all that code for each request, and only loading classes that were needed for that particular view. The second big decision was to rationalize the API, as there were clear issues with the existing one that had evolved over time. By coming up with a solid, common philosophy we were able to refactor the API with a much more logical approach, further simplifying efforts for developers. The third, and most significant decision was to approach Joomla! as more than a content management system, and focus on bringing a more framework-oriented approach to the architecture. This had a really profound impact on Joomla! in general, and also further necessitated core refactoring to break out the classes so that

Fig 1: Screenshot of Default Front End Interface

Gone is the venerable SolarFlare II template, replaced with a much more manageable layout that has more flexibility with module positions. There are other changes, but the most interesting I will save for the last.

Life on the Backside

So how does the administrator interface look? This is one of the most visible changes to the end user, as the entire administrator interface has been completely revamped. Immediately apparent is the new template colorscheme, as evidenced by the login screen. See Figure 2. The new look is driven from a totally new admin template, which also showcases the ability of Joomla! to allow for distinctly different looks on the administrator interface, not just the front end. Perhaps most telling is the main page, also called the Control Panel. See Figure 3.

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Fig 3: Screenshot of the Login Screen Fig 2: Screenshot of the Login Screen

We have brought out an entirely new set of icons as well, which is a welcome change of pace after looking at the previous icons for several years. We have also consolidated both the Control Panel choices, as well as the menu items. Gone are the multiple-nested menus, replaced with simple, logical menus that are typically only one level deep. The lone exception is for components, which is necessary for complex components otherwise you would have a simple menu that required many clicks to get where you needed for more sophisticated applications. We consolidated Content Items and Static Content Items to just one, which in this article are referred to as Articles. This is a test for now, however the final release may include this change in terminology. At the time of writing the debate was still in full swing, but for clarity I will continue to refer to them as Content Items in this article, until the change is made permanent. See Figure 4. The biggest change to the content editor is the consolidation of the content areas, also known as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What

You Get) areas. In 1.0.x there were two, one for the introductory text and another for the main body. As this was quite confusing for a lot of newcomers to Joomla!, we decided to simplify the whole content creation process by having one editor area and providing a button to create the Read More... link that signifies a separate page for lengthy text. You can see in the screenshot the text {readmore} that tells Joomla! you want to make that separation between introductory text and main text. For aggregate listings such as blog lists, this inserts a Read More... link at the end of the introductory text. We have also changed the code for insertion of images, from {mosimage} to just {image} for clarity, as well as getting away from the deprecated mos terminology which originally stood for Mambo Open Source. Also of note is the new styling of the images tab and related tabs, which are not layered anymore as tabs but rendered much more cleanly with expanding divs. This is a lot easier on slower machines and also is more cross platform to support a wider array of browsers and browser versions. See Figure 5.

Fig 4: Screenshot of the Content Manager

Fig 5: Screenshot of the Content Detail Page

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Cover Story Joomla! 1.5 Knocking At Your Door

The Global Configuration screen also gets some revamping, with the different configuration directives consolidated to just four tabs. This makes things a lot easier as well as quicker as we learned that having a configuration screen with ten or more tabs was just unmanageable. Also the top-level tabs are much more logical and intuitive, making it more likely for the newcomers to Joomla! to jump to the intended screen to make the changes that they desire. See Figure 6. The new Media Manager interface is a much-needed improvement over the old one; and is also a source of pride and joy of the happy parent (that would be developer Louis Landry). The tree on the left makes it so much more convenient to jump from folder to folder, which was a common interface complaint from the 1.0.x userbase. See Figure 7.
Fig 6: Screenshot of the Global Conguration

And now, for something completely different. Lets go back to the front end interface, login, and try to edit a content item. See Figure 8. Finally, some AJAX magic makes its way to the Joomla! Interface. Perhaps this is just a first step, but also paves the way for the front end content editor interface to be a lot more useful. Here is some dirty laundry from the old days: back in the Mambo universe, we were constantly hearing about how much everyone hated the front-end content editor interface. The problem is, none of us ever used it. The pain we felt to fix that just wasnt there. We never understood why it was such a big deal, or why everyone wanted us to spend so much time on the front-end when you had so much more power and capability available from the back end interface. Well, quite a few of us started taking jobs developing and customizing sites that used Mambo. For every single one of us, the very first project we worked on was an absolute horror from the front end content editor perspective, that is and we all vowed that the interface needed some serious work. The 1.5 development team put that need into action, and provided a fantastic interface to the front end that provides virtually the same power and capability as the one provided by the back end, but without giving back end access to your content writers. This is significant, as it takes an early, critical step in the process of us really rethinking how the front end interface should be used. Finally, folks that are restricted to the front end can rejoice!

Fig 7: Screenshot of the Media Manager

Developer Resources Everywhere

Speaking of developers, you can get a full reference of the new API at http://api.joomla.org/, and there is a developer portal at http://dev.joomla.org/. The portal is a great resource, as you can

Fig 8: Screenshot of Front End Editor

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read developer blogs, articles about the technology from a developer perspective, and find links to other resources to help you be as productive as you can be. Additionally, you can have free hosting of your open source Joomla! extension at forge.joomla.org, where you have access to a tracker, subversion repository, file release system, and more. This topic deserves some more detail, which I hope explains how fantastic a resource this is to you. The JoomlaForge happens to be the biggest instance of SourceForge Enterprise Edition (SFEE), in the world. We have over 25,000 registered developers working on more than 1,000 projects, spanning a huge variety of applications including document management, discussion forums, photo galleries, additional WYSIWYG editors, you name it! Not only is there a veritable cornucopia of applications to choose from, you can also set up your own project for free. If you are itching to develop a Joomla! extension and release it under an open source license, you can use all the formidable features provided by SFEE. As well you will have your project hosted in a Joomla!-centric environment, where you will always have the communitys interest. However, SFEE is not targeted at the non-technical end user that is looking for a photo gallery, it is targeted squarely at the developer who needs tools to collaborate with other developers working on a software project. So what can the non-developers do? We created our new software directory at http://extensions.joomla. org, where you can find a categorized list of available applications complete with reviews, links to the softwares home page, and more. This is where we like to send the users of the software to find additional functionality, in a non-techie presentation. This means that the SFEE interface remains focused solely on the needs of the developer, which is what SFEE is so good at.

Unlike the old forge (which I was the sole maintainer of for over a year), the new JoomlaForge is a feature rich, robust environment that really facilitates collaborative development.

But Wait, Theres More

There is one more screenshot that needs to be shown, which is the administrator interface for managing plugins, formerly known as mambots. See Figure 9. Plugins have had a complete and dramatic redesign that provides a real wealth of capabilities. You will see in this list of default plugins a new type of plugin for authentication. We have provided three authentication plugins for reference: the standard Joomla! authentication plugin that uses the stock Joomla! tables, a native LDAP plugin to authenticate from remote directory sources such as OpenLDAP, Netware or Microsofts Active Directory, and a little proof of concept authentication plugin that lets you login with your Google Mail accounts credentials. We have also included a stub for use with the XStandard WYSIWYG editor, which has an interesting implementation. Basically you install the editor locally on your machine (sorry, Windows is required at this point, were working on it); and when you wish to edit content, you dont have to wait for all that JavaScript to download to your browser locally before rendering the editor area. This makes editing content feel much more responsible, like a desktop application instead of a web-based content editor. Nice! Also you will see another new class of plugins, focused on functionality provided by XML-RPC capabilities. There is one plugin that lets you use a fat client blogging application (in this case, w.bloggar) to post content to your Joomla! web site. Not to leave it at that, we have also provided our own Joomla! XML-RPC interface, which will provide the means for fat client applications to interact with your web site like a web service. There is already a Java-based client called J!Explorer that is more than just a working prototype, to be found at www.joomlatools.org. The plugin installer has really gone through the upgrade process, where you no longer have to use a component installer, module installer and so on you can now just use the installer. Another much-needed addition is the capability to install from a URL, instead of constantly downloading to your client machine, and then uploading to the web server.

Speaking the International Language

One important topic not covered yet is the concept of language packs. This allows third-party developers to provide different language packs for their applications, not just at the Joomla! level but also at an application level.

Fig 9: Screenshot of Plugin Manager Interface

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Cover Story Joomla! 1.5 Knocking At Your Door

For example, say you wrote a component that provided a calendar for events, like GigCalendar at www.gigcalendar.net. What happens if someone downloads your application and they are speaking Spanish? Your component is still rendering the language you provided, which (in the case of GigCalendar) is English. By being able to provide a language pack for your component, it is now possible for someone using Joomla! in Spanish to also have GigCalendar, also in Spanish. It sounds much easier than it really is, and it is a wonderful capability for the international, multilingual community. This code tells Joomla! to check and see if the language in use is a right-to-left language; and if so, to load an additional stylesheet for the template. There are also ways to test to see if there are modules published in a particular position. So for example if you wanted to render HTML for the left module position, but only if there are published modules there, you can use the code shown in Listing 2.

Listing 2
Template Conditional Example 2
<jdoc:exists type=modules condition=left > <jdoc:include type=modules name=left style=-3 /> </jdoc:exists>

Sometimes Looks ARE Everything

So what happens to templates, you ask? We have changed the way templates are done, with a strict focus on making the template files as easy to edit as possible. One change is the move from PHP snippets in the HTML which frustrated and confounded many editors and proved a common source of syntax errors with a more XML-friendly format. For example, to include a module position in your template for the 1.0.x series, you would use:
<?php mosLoadModules ( user3, -1 ); ?>

Most importantly, there are tutorials on templates on the developer portal and of course the default template provided with the 1.5 distribution has all of these examples and more. By studying this template and how it is done, you can easily get started with the new syntax.

Its All in the Packaging

Another important point about the refactoring of Joomla! is that this has resulted in a much more framework-oriented package. It is actually correct to say that the Joomla! CMS was created with the Joomla! Framework. For example, the JApplication class allows you to create a standalone script that does not require the CMS, but has access to all the facilities as if the script was being rendered, and as if it was being delivered by the CMS. If you look in the distribution, you will see the libraries folder. This is actually the framework, and what we used to create the CMS. We are investigating what it would take to release the framework as a standalone package, and hopefully under the LGPL license to promote inclusion in other applications.

With 1.5 you would instead use:

<jdoc:include type=modules name=user3 style=-1 />

The first format makes great sense to a PHP developer, but is problematic for HTML editors, to say the least. First off, your document will not validate and of course it is very difficult to know while you are working on your template if it validates or not, without actually viewing (and validating) your output as rendered by Joomla! There are many reasons that this is undesirable. Another template feature is conditional logic, without the need for PHP. See the example in Listing 1.

Listing 1
Template Conditional Example 1
<jdoc:tmpl name=isRTL varscope=document type=condition conditionvar=LANG_ISRTL> <jdoc:sub condition=1> <link href=templates/{TEMPLATE}/css/ template_rtl.css rel=stylesheet type=text/css /> </jdoc:sub> </jdoc:tmpl>

Planning for the Future

I saved my favorite part for last. In the libraries folder, you will see the joomla folder containing the database folder. Here you see the foundation for making Joomla! capable of using a variety of different database platforms, allowing you to use not only MySQL but PostgreSQL, but some commercial database platforms as well. The first step is already done, and you can create your own database driver by using the existing mysql and mysqli ones as a reference point. But what about all that SQL littering the codebase?

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That is the next step. We are participating in the Google Summer of Code program, and hope that one of the projects will be researching and implementing a layer for Joomla! to generate SQL based on the driver, as opposed to hardcoding SQL statements everywhere in your code. There are already existing implementations for us to look at like ADOdb and Propel, and there is also plenty to learn from other languages such as java and python. It is my hopes that this layer is implemented in the next point release of Joomla!, so that you can choose the database platform that is right for you.

Conclusion
The 1.5 release of Joomla! includes some significant changes, as well as some welcome additions to functionality to ease the lives of third party developers for product development and custom work. Not only has the interface been simplified for the end user, the API has been rationalized for the developer. More importantly, this version is a lot more suited for complex applications and sophisticated requirements. This is an excellent platform for integrating systems, for example, and taking on other enterprise-scale challenges. With Joomla! 1.5 available, life as a web developer couldnt be any better!
is a core developer on the Joomla! content management team and focuses on database technologies and evangelism of the platform for application development, as well as being a champion of open source software. He is also a founder of JamboWorks, providing business and enterprise services and products based on the Joomla! application platform. There he works on training and client relationships, as well as business development. Mitch is also an active member of New York PHP, vocal booster of PHP and PostgreSQL. He can be found with his wife and children loitering somewhere in the parks of Manhattan with his PowerBook and a cigar.

We All Could Use A Little Change

And now a little bit for those of you that have already written applications to the 1.0.x API, and are worrying about the time you are going to spend moving to the 1.5 API. This was a very hot topic, and the lead developer on the 1.5 effort, Johan Janssens, has made a blog post [1] about migrating a very popular application called FacileForms that makes it easy to create forms and process the posted results. In a nutshell, Johan spent about an hour playing around with FacileForms to get what he wanted working in 1.5. That doesnt mean that it was fully ported, nor does it mean that all applications will be as easy, but it should be a great reference to those of you that are preparing for the migration of existing applications.

Mitch Pirtle

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