Here’s some feedback from the recent Melbourne, Australia JoomlaDay:

Ranging from beginners and enthusiasts through to experts and global developers, 135 people attended the sold out Melbourne JoomlaDay 08 at the University of Melbourne on Saturday February 2nd. The capacity crowd saw presentations on a range of areas to do with Joomla, including some exclusive demonstrations of Joomla! 1.5 features by Brad Baker and Sam Moffat from the Joomla Core Team. Norm Douglas walked through the basics of setting up Joomla! 1.0. Dinah Randall highlighted some of the issues that users will face in converting 1.0 templates into the new format for Joomla! 1.5.

Damian Hickey from Freeway Ecommerce (www.openfreeway.org) outlined issues being faced in regards to ecommerce in the coming months, and explained the path ZacWare were taking currently to integrate Freeway with Joomla.

Leslie Hawthorn from Google Highly Open Participation contest got the group thinking about mentoring students in the GHOP, where there’s currently over 100 projects being run in conjunction with Joomla.

Videos from the day will be posted to www.joomladay.org.au shortly, and all those who attended are encouraged to register and log into www.joomladay.org.au where there will be follow up discussions in the forum there.

Thanks once more to the sponsors of Joomladay - Techspace.com.au, Nerds on Site and Rochen hosting - for making the day possible. Feedback shows the event was extremely successful and the organizers are already looking forward to running an even bigger Melbourne event in 2009.

Further, there was also some feedback given on one of the biggest Australian IT sites here: www.itwire.com/content/view/16488/53/

It was one of the most well arranged and informative JoomlaDays I have personally attended. The venue was perfect, making presenting as well as listening easy. We even managed to get our own local wi-fi network setup in a few mins. (Thanks John for letting us use your MBP as an access point.)

Thanks once again to the organizers and all who attended. I’m looking forward to the next Australian JoomlaDay, which will be in Sydney.

Source: Brad

Security announcement

After releasing Joomla! 1.5 stable we have discovered a high priority security issue. The vulnerability has been discovered in XML-RPC in combination with the blogger API. There is a security problem in this code that makes it possible to alter the articles on your site (including removal). This problems has been fixed currently by members of the development team and the Joomla! bug squad, solution is now available from Subversion. So what do you need to do until we release Joomla! 1.5.1?

All Joomla! users who have enabled the XML-RPC Blogger API plugin should disable it!

If you have never enabled this plugin you do not need to do anything.

Progress toward 1.5.1

Beside this security fix we have been working on fixing other issues that where found after we released Joomla! 1.5. Let’s share the 1.5.1 highlights thus far:

1. Fixed XML-RPC/Blogger security issue.
2. Fix to sef issues including creation of optional livesite parameter if
   needed which will also allow reverse proxy.
3. Change to mass mail so that blind carbon is used, protecting email addresses
   of your users.
4. Fix to date function that was causing an error in the end publication date
   for some systems.
5. Fixed UTF 8 database detection
6. Addressed a number of internationalization issues.
7. Fixes to a number of minor issues

More help?

Thanks to all who have contributed issue reports, comments, suggestions and patches and for those who have tested proposed patches. You can help by following the tracker. In particular, you can help by:

• confirming or disconfirming open issues,
• proposing solutions (preferably with a patch file) for confirmed issues
• testing patches associated with pendng issues. 

And of course you can join the Joomla! bug squad if you want to help out on a regular basis

Source: willebil

So if you’ve used the migrator or checked out 1.5 you might have seen this strange “backlink” concept floating around the place. I was asked the question today what it was and if it is important to migrating your site. The quick answer is that its not critical though its probably something that you’re going to want to have, because its cool and it attempts to keep your old menu URL’s around so that you can still get to stuff with the old links. Did I mention it was also cool?

So the basic idea of backlink migration is that in 1.5 somebody went and rewrote SEF so it actually looks nice. We also have a completely new way of routing a whole heap of core components as well just to throw a lot of things off. We’ll add to the fun that a lot of people out there have deployed third party SEF as well because 1.0 SEF didn’t quite get the friendly part as good as what it is now in 1.5, which also adds to pain.

So if 1.5 is so different how do we handle this? There are a few options available to a stock Joomla! site: Legacy routing from the Legacy plugin and Legacy SEF from the Backlink Migration plugin. This will enable a lot of backwards compatibility for most links, especially if you’re using the Core SEF (about 90% of links appear to get things right). Also to use Legacy SEF you will need to have regular SEF enabled as well and used the .htaccess file as well. However not everyone is using Core SEF, so enter the other parts of the backlink migration plugin.

So what the backlink migrator does is export your old Itemid, a name, the original URL, an SEF url (generated by the 1.0 sef system from the original URL) and a new URL so that you can pipe things manually if need be. It pulls this information from your menu table, so it will attempt to find any item in your menu and migrate it using the 1.0 SEF to try and generate an SEF url. When the backlink migration plugin is active it uses all of this information to then try to match up the old information with the new information from the database. We’re basically trying to do our best to provide the ability to maintain backlinks where possible, but we can’t do it for everything.

So if you were wondering about backlink migration, then that is basically it. Its pretty simple but I’m hoping it will allow more people to migrate without the pain. The basic aim is to make sure links still go somewhere, not into a 404 black hole, and that search engines will gradually update with the new links (since that is what will be handed out). Eventually your old links will go away and you can switch of all of these plugins and be happy with nice shiny SEF urls

Source: pasamio

The biggest news this month was the release of Joomla! 1.5. This has been a very busy time for all involved in the S&I Workgroup.

On a personal note:
I’d like to invite you all to join with me in giving a special thanks to the more than 100 moderators who help out on our forum. Also, the Global Moderators deserve a special thanks from me personally. I can tell you all now, that without the help of all these people, who tirelessly devote hours and hours to Joomla!, we would not be in the shape we are in. Next time you see one of these people around, be sure to thank them.

There are exciting things on the horizon, with plenty of room for more people to become involved. There are initiatives going on the behind the scenes. You never know where we might be able to use you, if you would like to volunteer to help us out. “Joomla! is not for coders only!”
Be sure to get in touch if you would like to help out.

I’ve just enjoyed the Melbourne JoomlaDay where we met so many of you (more than 130). Thanks again to all that attended. It means a lot to us to know that our (the entire Joomla! Community) efforts are used so widely and valued so much.

So, until next month, remember the slogan: “Joomla! is not for coders only!”

Source: Brad

The biggest news this month was the release of Joomla! 1.5. This has been a very busy time for all involved in the S&I Workgroup.

On a personal note:
I’d like to invite you all to join with me in giving a special thanks to the more than 100 moderators who help out on our forum. Also, the Global Moderators deserve a special thanks from me personally. I can tell you all now, that without the help of all these people, who tirelessly devote hours and hours to Joomla!, we would not be in the shape we are in. Next time you see one of these people around, be sure to thank them.

There are exciting things on the horizon, with plenty of room for more people to become involved. There are initiatives going on the behind the scenes. You never know where we might be able to use you, if you would like to volunteer to help us out. “Joomla! is not for coders only!”
Be sure to get in touch if you would like to help out.

I’ve just enjoyed the Melbourne JoomlaDay where we met so many of you (more than 130). Thanks again to all that attended. It means a lot to us to know that our (the entire Joomla! Community) efforts are used so widely and valued so much.

So, until next month, remember the slogan: “Joomla! is not for coders only!”

Source: Brad