In the not-too-distant past I wrote several extensions for
Joomla.
I wrote these extensions not just to satisfy my curiosity about Joomla but to also support
my personal project,
Groja.com/SeeOurMinds.com.
Having worked with PHP Nuke
a bit in the early 2000s, by 2008 I was curious about other, more respectable, we might say, LAMP CMSes.
At the time, my servers were running
Gentoo,
which uses
portage
to keep the operating system's software up-to-date.
After some research and experimentation, I learned that
Joomla
was a popular CMS that was in portage,
which should help make it easier to keep it up-to-date.
So I bought a few books and wrote several Joomla extensions — components, modules, plugins, and templates —
and keep the code on
github.
The
joomoositestyle
repo contains a template, component, and module that work together to allow users to
customize the appearance of the site.
This turned out to be a fun way for me to play around with using
JavaScript
and the
MooTools
JavaScript Library to dynamically alter the site's
CSS!
Alas, although this was fun, it was not very practical.
But still, just having fun is fine!
The
joomoogallery
repo contains a component that displays lists of galleries, pages of gallery groups, and individual gallery images.
I had some fun writing this one as well, this time using the
MooTools
JavaScript Library to add functionality that lets the visitor use their mouse wheel to resize the images.
Last but definitely not least, the
joomoocomments
repo contains a component and content plugin that support user-generated comments on
Joomla content articles and JoomooGallery groups and images.
Note that although these extensions are obsolete, some of the code might be salvagable!
The main reasons are, I did it out of curiosity, for the experience, and for practice.
I wrote them because I enjoy programming and wanted to
learn how to write extensions for Joomla.
Why these extensions in particular, though?
Thanks for asking!
I wrote these extensions specifically to support my main sites,
Groja.com
and
SeeOurMinds.com.
At the time, sites that followed the rolling blog paradigm, such as
icanhascheezeburger.com,
were fairly popular.
At least there were several that I enjoyed visiting daily there — for a while....
So I thought I would try developing extensions that would support similar functionality.
Of course now we all have our own personalized rolling blog, on
facebook.com.
Allow the visitor to input their personality, based on the four pairs of opposites
described by Carl Jung in his
General Description of the Types
Draw an image of the personality
This was the fourth version of this program.
I wrote the first version in LISP while in graduate school, the second version in PHP 4,
and the third version using PHP Nuke.
So now I am working on the fifth — and probably not final —
version of this idea, with the following goals:
Using
AWD and RESS,
because I want the User Experience for the sites to be potentially much different
on mobile devices than it is on desktops
Making it much more interactive, now that we all have touch screens
Making it much more personal, because some types do not like to share their results
Having fun learning and playing with new tech
Once the new server is live, there may not much to see at
Groja.com
and
SeeOurMinds.com.
But I am actively considering the alternatives, and the goal is to change that very soon!
Having seen my
main project
through, from start to finish, four times now,
and having played a
variety of roles in a variety of industries,
I feel more than qualified to call myself a
Full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Analyst/Developer/Tech Writer.
When Technical Debt Goes Obsolete
Why are these extensions obsolete?
As with most things, there are multiple reasons.
The changes made to Joomla going from version 1.x to 2.x were so extensive that most site owners were
forced to redesign their sites from scratch.
Many people migrated from Joomla to a different CMS because of these changes — and I should know because I am one of them.
Note that because the extensions I wrote were very secure, I was, however, able to run the Joomla 1.x site for
many years after they stopped supporting the release!
There are so many interesting things going on with JavaScript these days,
sometimes it seems like the idea of using a LAMP CMS for a blog has become rather anachronistic.
Of course one doesn't preculde the other, it's just that we have so many more options now than we did before!
Moreover though I really want to make this project into something much more interactive and mobile-friendly, and
JavaSscript is definitely the way to go for that.
It would probably be fairly easy to port these extensions to the latest version of Joomla, I am not sure.
If you are interested in taking on this project, let me know, and the code is yours!
If your site uses very secure code, it can have an extended lifetime,
but eventually the rapidly-changing technology and even new paradigms and changing visitors' tastes
can make any site "obsolete."
In the meantime, I will be using this as an opportunity to find some interesting new tech and
paradigms to use for my idea, so stay tuned!
