stressfree - joomla

StressFree website migrated to Drupal

David — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 11:41:49 +0000

Over the weekend I have migrated the StressFree website across to the Drupal content management system. The move was spurred on by the shortcomings I kept finding in Joomla, the desire to be able to tag content and the knowledge that the next upgrade to Joomla 1.5 would require almost starting from scratch.

I have tried my best to maintain all the legacy links so hopefully the old Joomla and static file links should resolve okay. Overall it went really smoothly, Drupal is a little bit more difficult to get your head around compared to Joomla but now that I've made the switch I am very glad. There has been limited loss of functionality in the switch but a tonne of new features are now available:

Firstly I can now tag content and there are tag clouds available. This should make finding content a lot easier though in the future I wouldn't mind finding a 'related tags' type module for Drupal.
Also it looks like Drupal's content search engine actually works (compared to Joomla/Mambo's effort).
On the administration side I now have an xmlrpc interface for writing content which will mean I can finally give Ecto some real use instead of always working through a web browser for publishing content.
The new comment engine looks a lot better than the Joomla version as it supports html comments and replies.
The 'printer friendly' option is far superior than Joomla's. Not only is it tidier but it also has the ability to extract hyperlinks from content and print them below the article as footnotes (which is very cool).

One piece of functionality that Joomla has over Drupal is their {mospagebreak} tag and its ability to auto-generate table of contents for long articles. It does make navigating larger documents a little less user-friendly but it is a small price to pay for the extra functionality gains.

Migration-wise it looks like content has come across okay. Some of the comments are a little messed up due to the significant formatting differences between the two systems. Over the next week I'll go through all the comments and tidy them up so there is no confusion.

Another fix to Joomla's RSS feeds

David — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 02:44:51 +0000

By default Joomla's RSS feeds do not provide an absolute URL to the content item which leaves the RSS looking like the following:
<link>some_piece_of_content.html</link>

This is okay when the RSS source is the host website but if you are running the feed through FeedBurner some feed readers (and Technorati) can get confused. When they get confused the resulting URL to the source item becomes:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/some_piece_of_content.html

Which of course does not work. To fix this edit the /components/com_rss/rss.php file in the Joomla installation directory. Find the line that reads:

$item_link = sefRelToAbs( $item_link );

And add the following below it:

$item_link = htmlspecialchars( $mosConfig_live_site ). $item_link;

This will generate complete URL's for your RSS readers and solve any inconsistancies with the feed readers out there.

'Fixing' Joomla's RSS feed

David — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 22:13:28 +0000

By default Joomla changes all formatting in RSS feeds to CDATA (ie non-html interpretable) fields. This creates ugly and very difficult to read feeds sometimes. To fix this edit the following file:

$JOOMLA_DIRECTORY/components/com_rss/rss.php

Find the line that reads:

$item_description = mosHTML::cleanText( $item_description );

at approximately line 197, comment it out.
This should create more aesthetically pleasing RSS feeds (with working hyperlinks and image tags).

Next go to about line 266 where the line that reads: '$item_link = sefRelToAbs( $item_link );' and add:

$item_link = $info[ 'link' ] . $item_link;

This will add absolute links to your feed which is good when using Feedburner. I recommend using FeedBurner as a frontend to your RSS feeds as not only does it provide useful statistical services it also saves on bandwidth and has options to generate universal (RSS 1.0/RSS 2.0/Atom) feeds to ensure compatability with the various readers.

Site Upgraded to Joomla

David — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 22:12:51 +0000

Of late I have been pretty busy and have not been able to do much maintenance on the website. For some unknown reason the comments function stopped working and thanks to a renegade SUSE PHP security update the mod_rewrite Apache extension stopped working (resulting in a lot of dead links).

This morning I upgraded Mambo to the latest version (4.5.3) and found things were going so well that I did a full migration across to Joomla 1.04. This migration turned out a lot easier than I first expected which is a welcome relief. Now the comments section works as expected and I have put in place some Apache redirects so that the more popular mod_rewrite links continue to function as normal. Hopefully Novell/SUSE will sort their PHP package out and get mod_rewrite working again (it has been a good week since it broke so hopefully it will be any day now).

Joomla!/Mambo Overview

David — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 08:37:38 +0000

At the moment this site is still on Mambo but when things quieten down I will be migrating across to Joomla! as I have a feeling it will have a stronger development path. I just wrote the following email to my friend in order to give him some information about Mambo/Joomla! so I figure why not post this up on the site so that if anyone else asks in the future the information in close at hand.

Joomla! is a completely open-source fork of Mambo. Mambo 4.5.2 code-wise is identical to Joomla! 1.0 except there's a few security/bug tweaks and different graphics are used. At the moment components/modules are compatible between the two systems but I can see a day when this won't be the case in the not too distant future.

Just a rundown on Mambo/Joomla! terminology, components are big pieces of functionality, modules are small blocks of presentation code and mambots are little background helpers that do a variety of things. The three pieces working together create the full system.
Mambo & Joomla! also provide the following functionality:
RSS feeds, search engine friendly URLs, users/groups, email notification and statistics.

Here are some useful Joomla!/Mambo links:

TMEdit/XHTML Suite: A very good editor for Joomla/Mambo:
http://www.xhtmlsuite.com/index.php?lang=en&option=com_content&task=section&id=4&Itemid=49

Mambo Portal: Lots of useful components & modules:
(you need to register, free, a bit of a pain but no spam)
http://www.mamboportal.com/

DOCMan: A not too bad (but sometimes a little flaky) document manager component:
http://www.mambodocman.com/

Zoom: Gallery component:
http://mamboforge.net/projects/zoom/

Joomla! 1.0 released

David — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 21:59:42 +0000

Joomla! is a completely open-source branch of Mambo, a popular content management system I use for this site. There has always been some difficulty with the licensing of Mambo which has caused friction between the owners of the intellectual property and the open source developers.

Finally friction evolved into a full scale split and now the open source developers have split from the Mambo source tree to create Joomla!, a completely open source branch of Mambo. Right now these two trees are completely the same (save for some aesthetic changes) but it looks like their development paths will be completely separate. This equates to a lot of confusion in the community as to what will happen with all the different plugins and how they will or will not be compatible between the two systems. At the moment we can only wait and see.

I would like to see the Joomla! developers create a more CSS friendly system as at present the underlying code behind Mambo is pretty ugly in parts. At the moment there is MamBoX which complies to XHTML strict but it is running well behind the current version of Mambo in terms of features and polish.