Torkil Johnsen

I write code, so I care mostly about what’s happening to the Joomla Framework. Or should I say not happening? The Joomla project needs more coders and less talkers, to put it bluntly, much like a boat won’t get anywhere with just captains and no rowers. More and more people in the Joomla community seems to realise this and are taking up responsibility and working outside the core code to make the improvements needed in various areas. Let’s take a look…
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Those of you following blogs and tweets in the Joomlasphere and reading about Nooku, might have read and learned about MVC and HMVC already. If not, here is a short explanation on MVC, and why you should care about design patterns and MVC in particular, especially if you’re a Joomla user. (more…)

Let me try to explain, in non-technical terms, what a framework is and why using the Nooku Framework is a good idea.
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Back in 2006 I was a member of the standards and guidelines workgroup in Joomla, and during my involvement there I produced the Joomla 1.5 database schema as a DB Designer EER diagram, so people could view the database in a visual way. I recently also set up the Joomla 1.6 database schema, this time using MySQL Workbench which is a better tool for the job, and also GPL and available on multiple platforms. During my work with setting up the 1.6 schema, I came across lots of oddities and lacks of normalization, and a severe lack of naming conventions and guidelines became obvious.
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As some might remember I made a visual representation of the Joomla 1.5 database schema back in 2006. I have now set up an EER representation of the Joomla 1.6 database schema too, that you can download for free. This schema was made after the 1.6 beta 2 release, and it was built using MySQL Workbench, which is both GPL and available as a free download for multiple platforms.
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Just bumped into Phing, and thought I’d share my experiences. Installing Phing is easy enough. Phing is a build system in the shape of a PHP Pear package, that can do many things. To quote Hans Lillelid, this could include for instance configuring, packaging, uploading and testing. Ideal for building installable Joomla zip-files, which is what I am using it for right now.
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