Toluu : Blog - Joomlatools

Blog - Joomlatools

We are a small team of expert Joomla! consultants who joined forces in 2006. Our business activity revolves around Joomla! training and consulting services and the development of extensions for the Joomla! community. We are active contributors or committers on several open source projects most importantly Joomla!

100 posts and countingDecember 18 2008

Little over a year ago we published our first 'Hello world' post. More then 100 posts later our feed has been viewed over 100.000 times and we had 30.000 individual clicks on our blog posts. A big thanks to all of you who started following us in the past year !

We talked on a variety of topics, from Joomla tips and tricks to brainstorming ideas, our bootcamps and off course updates about our own products. I did a bit of digging in our archives and compiled a list of the 10 most read posts based on different statistics :

Joomla, meet AlfrescoDecember 10 2008

Today, after a year of hard work, we are proud to announce the release of our Joomla 1.5 integration for Alfresco. In case you don't know Alfresco, it's an open source enterprise content management system solution written in Java.

There are hundreds of thousands of Alfresco users worldwide and millions of Joomla sites. Alfresco and Joomlatools both believe that it is important to collaborate on building open source solutions that work together. So we teamed up, and here's the result: you can now use your Joomla site as a front-end for Alfresco document repository!

What can it do ?

Our integration enables you to access the powerful back-end content repository services of Alfresco, directly from your Joomla site. The integration allows you to manage, preview and track content and digital assets on collaborative Joomla web sites, using Alfresco’s content library. Similarly Alfresco users will be able to search, publish, share, download, and edit content directly on Joomla sites.

How does it work ?

This integration uses the new CMIS standard. It's an Atom-based software interoperability protocol, that was created by EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP. It was developed especially for this purpose: connecting different CMS systems, using a single protocol. CMIS is brand new, so here at

Nooku 0.6 : pushing Joomla to its limitsNovember 27 2008

Two weeks ago we released Nooku 0.6 at the first Joomladay in Switzerland. The new 0.6 version focuses completely on SEO. With Nooku 0.5 we already had the basic translations features implemented, with the new 0.6 version we are pushing the envelope even further.

Today, if you want to create a multi-lingual search engine optimized Joomla website you need to install a multi-tude of different extensions (multi-lingual, search engine friendly URLs, metadata, etc...) . Nooku 0.6 solves all that out of the box... and makes it all translatable. Neat huh !

Alias validation

One of the features I'm personally very proud of is the new alias validation. Simply put Nooku 0.6 prevents duplicated aliases for all content items (articles, weblinks, categories, sections, banners, etc...). It is also capable of correctly converting (transliterating) a title into an alias on the fly for almost any language.

Nooku 0.6 needed alias validation to allow us to remove the numeric information from

Joomla 1.6 SEF: Smarter than humansNovember 24 2008

(This is the second part of a little case study on usability. Read "Deconstructing Joomla 1.6 SEF Settings" first.)

Here's the table from part 1 again:

Option Tooltip message 1. Search Engine Friendly URLs Select whether or not the URLs are optimised for Search Engines2. Add suffix to URLsIf yes, the system will add a suffix to the URL based on the document type3. Use Apache mod_rewriteSelect to use the Apache Rewrite Module to catch URLs that meet specific conditions and rewrite them as directed Warning: Apache users only! Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess before activating.

Let's try to come up with some ways to make it easier to understand.

1. SEF URLs

A user expects Joomla to output a 'good' site, and a good site has SEF URL's. The historical reasons to have a configuration option for this, are no longer relevant in 1.6. My suggestion: turn SEF on in all installations and remove the option.

2. Add suffix to URLs

This feature adds .html, .feed, .pdf... It looks a lot better than adding ?format=pdf. It fits in nicely with the idea that a website has a /my/folder/myfile.html

Deconstructing Joomla 1.6 SEF SettingsNovember 24 2008

Most people don't read manuals. All we can do is make sure our applications are easy and intuitive for everybody. Joomla does pretty well in that area, hence it's success, but the work is never done. And many third party developers seem to confuse 'options' with 'features', and 'configurability' with 'power'.

When working on Nooku, we constantly ask ourselves: "Do we really want the user to make a decision here? Can the system decide this without user interaction?" For each configuration option, users will need to understand

what it does,
how it will affect their site, and
whether that is a good thing or not.

To illustrate the process of making an application easier, let's do a small case study of the SEF feature that is in J!1.5. There are three Yes/No options in the Global Configuration:

Even though a user knows what a search engine is, that doesn't mean he knows what search engine optimization is. The user might interpret it as "O