Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 8
- Sending email with Joomla and MAMP
- The 3rd Joomla! Day India
- Open Source Matters Fourth Quarter Goals Update
- SocialConnect - a new Joomla! extension for better social reach & user engagement
- Standard Joomla 3 Template is now available
- An advanced Joomla template theming tool
- Zenbase a free Joomla 3 template
Sending email with Joomla and MAMP
Written by Brian Teeman
Several years ago now I switched from a windows/linux computer to a Mac and since then I've always been using MAMP as my local development web server. MAMP is great as it lets me do all the initial development of a web site on my laptop before ever going near a live server. The one thing I've really been missing is that it is not possible to send emails so any functionality that requires that, such as user registration, contact forms or notifications, can't be tested until I upload the site to a live server.
Last night I sat down to try and resolve this and to my suprise it took me about 10 minutes of searching to find two posts which together solved this. I'm writing the instructions down here more for my own records than for you. You use them at your own peril and risk and they are definitely not for beginners. They work for me, and others according to the links, but I can not guarantee they will work for you.
Written by Ashwin Date
The JUG Pune & JUG Mumbai had organised the 3rd Joomla! Day in Mumbai, and what an event it was! We had Ryan Ozimek, David Hurley, Ofer Cohen and more than half a dozen speakers from various parts of India. We also had an enthusiastic audience from far corners, and all of them were more than willing to soak in every bit of the knowledge the community wished to impart. The Joomla Handshake #jhandshake too was ideated, you can view the video on Ryan's Vine.
Ryan, dressed in a traditional kurta started off with the keynote which was informative and not to mention, entertaining. The mammoth 200 slide presentation was just short of a 25fps movie and covered Ryan's role as an ex-president, the Joomla community in general and of course a customary roundup of Joomla! Rocks! David was next, with a talk about where we are heading with Joomla 3, and all the great things we can expect - languages and ACL included.
Open Source Matters Fourth Quarter Goals Update
Written by Paul Orwig
The final part of the 2012 goal setting/budget planning process suggests that each leadership team publish quarterly updates on progress for each of their major goals. Following through on this part of the process is important-it promotes increased openness and transparency, it strengthens accountability and trust between the project's leadership and the community, and it recognizes the volunteer contributors who are the most important resource for our project's continued growth and success.
This post gives a summary of progress that was made during the fourth quarter for Open Source Matters' (OSM) four major 2012 goals, along with the names of key contributors for each of the items. Sincerest thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the progress that was made on these goals during the fourth quarter! Here are blogs summarizing OSM quarterly goal updates from earlier this year:
SocialConnect - a new Joomla! extension for better social reach & user engagement
Written by Fotis Evangelou
A few days ago we launched SocialConnect, a new kind of social extension for Joomla! which we plan to extend over time to become the no. 1 integration hub for social networks for your Joomla! site. It's part of our "masterplan" to redefine what we consider basic functionality for any Joomla! site. It started with K2 and now it's moving deeper into more specialized areas. SocialConnect is an extension that -as with all things made by JoomlaWorks- came out from a real need.
And it was tested extensively for more than a year on the K2 Community, before being publicly released. In this first version of SocialConnect we wanted to redefine the entire user engagement process. Let's face it, the user login/logout process in Joomla! is problematic. It's not problematic in the sense that it doesn't work. It's problematic for a "user experience" aspect.
Standard Joomla 3 Template is now available
I'm happy to announce that the Standard Joomla template is now available in a Joomla 3 compatible version. If you recall the initial release of Standard back in September 2012, it was released as a part of our Zen Building Blocks collection. The Zen Building blocks were released as a pack of responsive starter Joomla templates that aimed to cover a wide variety of common layout types.
T3, LESS and Joomla 3 ready ...
The updated theme has some awesome control over colours using Theme Magic. I wrote about the possibilities of using Theme Magic a little earlier today and I think that when you take a look at the Theme Magic options available in this new release of Standard, I'm pretty sure you will agree that this is an incredible customisation tool.
An advanced Joomla template theming tool
Theme magic is a non-destructive real time preview tool for your T3 powered website. Theme Magic makes it possible to create a multitude of theme presets and colour schemes by using a colour wheel or specific HEX values in order to manipulate pre-determined elements within the template.
How does Theme Magic work?
Theme Magic uses LESS files to interface with the template variables file to make changes to the Joomla template in real time. It allows the user to create multiple preset settings by storing custom LESS variables, which are then used to populate the theme with. The default preset references the default values set in the main template variables.less file. While each preset or variation uses the custom-variables.less file located in the less/themes/[my preset]/ folder.
Zenbase a free Joomla 3 template
Zenbase is a vanilla / skeleton / blank / scaffold (or anything else you want to call it) Joomla 3 Template. It is a free Joomla 3 template that is an ideal starting point for your next project using Joomla 3 and T3.
Please note:
The Live preview of the Zen base theme features the Zentools module however the free quickstart package does not include this member only extension. Zen base is built on bootstrap and includes:
