Archive for February, 2011
Nginx for the world… and Joomla
After months of discussion on the virtues of cloud servers and Nginx, I was recently tasked with moving all the Nooku sites over to Rackspace Cloud. With that in mind, I have documented the basic install process for the benefit of all.
For our install, we will be using Ubuntu 10.04 and installing/configuring:
The Dark Side of Nooku Framework
This is a guest post from Daniel Chapman, CEO and Founder of Ninjaforge, Nooku Contributor and community member.
Drinking the Nooku coolaid can be dangerous
After we released Ninjaboard, our first major Nooku Framework based extension, Johan asked me to say a few words about what we felt about working with Nooku Framework.
Aside from Ninjaboard, we have used the Nooku Framework on a few client sites for custom work. We are also currently porting all of our major extensions over the Nooku Framework. At Ninja Forge, we are hoping to be fully Nooku Framework powered in the near future.
There has already been a lot said about the good things that the Nooku Framework has to offer so I am going to do the opposite, I am going to talk about the downsides that we discovered when using the Nooku Framework. Read the rest of this entry »
Nooku Framework’s 3rd Birthday!
Just over three years ago, on 12 February 2008, we made the first commit to our beloved Nooku Framework. Today, Nooku Framework drastically speeds up the creation and maintenance of Joomla extensions while eliminating repetitive coding and adding power, flexibility and fun. Finally, you can focus on what matters most: your extension’s business logic and user experience.
Definition: “to nookify” (verb) : Collaborating to make code reusable, flexible and magical. Often leads to reduction of 60-80% in code.
Introducing Nooku Platform
On the 4th of February 2011, we attended the first ever Joomlanight in Stockholm, Sweden. The topic of this event was “Joomla: At The Edge Of Innovation” and hosted three talks:
- “The Road Ahead for Joomla!” by Ryan Ozimek
- “Molajo Joomla! 1.6 Distribution” by Marco Barbosa
- “Nooku – Evolving and Innovating Joomla!” by our own Johan Janssens
Johan introduced the Nooku Platform, vision, strategy and roadmap:
- Nooku Framework, rapid extension development framework
- Nooku Server, multi-site and multi-lingual distribution of Joomla
- Nooku Community, innovative and open source community
The event was broadcasted live on the inter-tubes, thanks to Martin Blodau. If you missed it, sit back and enjoy Johan’s talk. We also made the presentation available here.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jamming in Lugano with Nooku
On Wednesday, 19 January 2011, Joomla integrators and PHP developers gathered at the University of Lugano, CH for the first Swiss Nooku Jam. The Jam took place during the annual Beyounic Camp, a strategic workshop hosted by our friends from Beyounic.
Beyounic is the team behind Ohanah, a social event management platform built on Nooku Framework. They have become great friends in the past year and we (Tom and myself) were very excited to travel to Lugano to see their new office and organize a Nooku Jam together.
Geeks, students and teachers
Despite the exam period, we got a room full of interested informatics students, teachers and many other great people coming also from abroad. (@andreatorre came over all the way from Rome, Italy @luscarpa joined us from Venice, Italy)
With so many really talented people in the room, we were able to touch some very technical topics. Design patterns, use of web 3.0/semantic technologies, security, etc. Feedback during and after the event was great. The Jam was well appreciated by the faculty program manager and the participants.
First Nooku Developer Group
The afternoon after the event, a group of students got really interested in learning more about the Nooku Framework. For us this means the first seed for a swiss Nooku developer group has been successfully planted!
Read the rest of this entry »
Rebuilding a demo site automatically
Recently I have been working on the demo server that will house our various demo sites.
One of the common issues with a demo site is that to preserve its integrity you may need to either restrict access or have a periodic rebuild. Restricting access may work sometimes but it’s likely to inhibit people trying out anything that is administrative in nature. Hence rebuilding the site is a far more appealing alternative.
The idea is basically delete everything and replace with a fresh copy, but to do so with minimum downtime. The result should be a quick and secure rebuild. With that in mind we set about creating bash script that would rebuild the site as often as required (run as a cron job).
To get started I mapped out the process.
As you can see we do everything using version control which in this case happened to be subversion.
By updating then exporting into a temp folder, the longest part of the process is done prior to any impact on the site. I threw in the checkout logic so that the same script could be used to build a brand new site (as in, one that does not already exist).
The first impact on the public site is the dropping of the database unless there have been changes to the repository that required database modifications.
For a typical site the whole process takes 13 seconds when no changes have been committed to subversion, with less than 2 seconds of downtime.
Read the rest of this entry »
