JomSocial Blog
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Developer Tips: Extend any JomSocial form easily
I was was recently contacted by a developer who wanted some help hacking JomSocial core code. Within JomSocial privacy setting page, he wanted to add some of his own form elements, which would affect some privacy setting of his application.
What? hacking JomSocial core files ? NOOOOO! Really, you don't have to do that bro! Let me show you easy way to extend any JomSocial form with your own content, all from within a plugin.
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JomSocial is Taking a REST
We are very excited to announce that our first alpha release of JomSocial REST server is available for testing from the development forum. This early build is of course, still minimal in features and serves only public data at the moment. Future builds with proper authentication system are being developed as we speak.
But, what is a "REST" server? Well, it doesn't actually mean that your server can take a rest and process less data. It is simply a new way to represent your content to the rest of the world. A REST server implementation opens many new possibilites for you to serve your content. For example, developing a widget based on your existing photo gallery would be a lot easier.
You may also allow your data to be streamed from other sites, or even on mobile devices. You may create a native iPhone apps that allow users to interact with your content. Someone might be interested in building a mobile application that allows status update from a mobile device. Perhaps a desktop application that allow your to manage your photos online better. All of these will be made possible with our REST server implementation. -
JomSocial 1.6 Powerful New API: Controller Creation Override
I want to talk about 1 particular trigger point that we added to JomSocial 1.6, that is so simple, yet massively powerful.
We are talking about "onBeforeControllerCreate" trigger point. This trigger allows any plugins to override the controller object creation with any other object type. To put it simply, plugins now have the ability to redraw or control access to any JomSocial page easily, without hacking any of our core files.
Let me perhaps paint a picture of what is possible.
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Operation aborted error messages in Joomla
If you are getting an error 'operation aborted' in Internet Explorer when viewing the videos page, this is most likely caused by the use of 'domready' in Joomla's tooltip library. The only quick work around right now is to edit the file JOOMLA/libraries/joomla/html/html/behavior.php and at line 109, look for the following block of codes,
$tooltipInit = ' window.addEvent('domready', function(){ var JTooltips = new Tips($$(''.$selector.''), '.$options.'); });';
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Reportings !
Yeah! Finally some time off from coding. I have seen quite a number of users requesting this feature and now, here's a little sneak preview of what's coming up very shortly =P
( Frontend view when a user tries to submit a report )
( Frontend view once a user submitted a report )
( Backend view for administrators to manage these reports )
The idea behind the entire reporting feature is so that 3rd party developers, be it a plugin developer, application developer could very easily use this library and not to mention it only requires a couple of lines to generate the reporting link. ; ) -
Some updates on JomSocial plugins and API
We have started significant amount of work on JomSocial plugins. Our top priority, is of course to get the API right, just right. When developing API, our philosophy is simple. Yes, 'simple' . For the initial release, our API will be very lean, yet usable. Although, we could potentially load up JomSocial with tons and tons of system "hooks", I will only open a few key ones, and will use feedbacks from 3rd party developer to determine which other events that they need to use.
Of course, having our code super clean, with an extremely clean MVC implementation means developer can directly request various objects and data easily.
