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Sydney JUG Meeting: Building Community Sites
Date and Time: Tuesday April 14th 2009, 6:15pm-8:30pm
Venue: Capture capture.com.au/
Suite 44 (4th floor, turn right)
61 Marlborough Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010
Host: Audra Barclay
Minutes: Kay Chan
Attendees: Audra, Nick, Kay, Halison, Michael E., Christian, Bronwyn, Selena, Alfra Noel, Richard(?). Apologies for anyone I have missed.
6:15pm: Welcome and introductions
6:30pm Definition of a community site
- A site that reaches a community, and also provides articles and information.
- A site which allows a group of people to communicate with each other, using tools such as forums, instant messaging, share documents and files.
- A site in which users can interact and share information with each other. Examples: articles (Wikipedia.com), blog comments (wordpress.com) , video sharing (youtube.com), social networking (myspace.com), share photos and chat (facebook.com)
6:45pm Hacking: Who has been hacked and why? How can you avoid it?
- Christopher has been hacked about 10 times (out of 200 Joomla sites). Common reasons why is that Zoom Gallery was installed, and also if the site was hosted on a shared server
- Others have had issues with Joomla was hosted on shared servers.
- Some had issues when hosted on a Microsoft server, and the problem was resolved when Joomla was moved to Linux. However, Nick suggests that if hosted on Microsoft, make sure that it is securely set up.
- How can you tell if you’ve been hacked? Commonly your site will say it’s been hacked – ie the home page will be rewritten. Other dangerous hacks can redirect your site to another site.
- More malicious hacks will show no sign that they have hacked your site, and they may be well hidden in folders and perhaps scripted to download files to a visitor’s computer.
How to avoid being hacked?
- Make sure the component isn’t black listed (docs.joomla.org/Vulnerable_Extensions_List) Although this list may be outdated, no longer updated by Joomla.
- If possible avoid shared servers
- Uninstall any components and templates that your site doesn’t use.
- If a component requires .htaccess to be writable upon installation, temporarily make its permission writable (755, 775 or 777) and as soon as the component is installed change its permission back to 644 (or more secure)
- Use a sandbox to filter what content is downloaded to your PC
7pm Community Site: What works, what to watch out for.
- Most users had positive experiences using Community builder, Kunena and Moset’s Tree on Joomla 1.0.15.
- However, not much luck with finding a suitable community component and a forum that will be compatible with Joomla 1.5.
- Zoom gallery – beware of unstable components which may allow hackers in
- Mosets tree – not good for Joomla 1.5, makes permanent changes to the database/ Joomla core files.
- Jomsocial - No one had experiences with using it. However Kay had some issues with user avatars (possibly because of file permissions). Looks like a promising component for Joomla 1.5 . Users agreed that Jomsocial may be a feasible to use with Joomla1.5, depending on its development and progress (perhaps in a few months, some will consider using it)
What we want in a community site component
- Something that works in Joomla 1.5, and a way to migrate from Joomla 1.0.15
- Ability to search profiles by age, location, etc.
- Share photos, have photos in your user profile – with multiple file upload.
- More user access control levels
- Have group within groups, such as a hierarchy in which users can control (think of Amway)
7:30pm Joomla 1.0.15 vs Joomla 1.5
- It seems that most users had 1.0.15 sites.
- A few people had concerns with upgrading from 1.0.15 to 1.5 with regards to information transfer (within components/extensions) and also compatibility of components with Joomla 1.5.
- They found that components that they are using for 1.0.15 are not ready for Joomla 1.5 yet (they are still buggy or in beta, or not available for 1.5 at all)
Forums
- Was some mention of Kunena as an alternative forum for Joomla 1.5
- Fireboard and vBulletin was a popular choice for 1.0.15
- Kay uses Joomla to phpBB 3 bridge: p8pbb bridge for Joomla 1.5 – it links the forum login to Joomla – so that users only need to login to the Joomla frontend once and they are automatically logged into phpBB. However, does this method use cookies? RSS
- Is there a way to pull RSS feeds from other sites into Joomla?
- Issue of unwanted and unrelated feeds, how can you pick which feeds you want
- Solution: For best content control, use netvibes or igoogle to pull feeds into your own account then pick the feeds you want to upload to your Joomla site.
7:50pm Looked at COFA UNSW website that uses community builder (or group jive?)
- Presented by Selena Griffith, design lecture at UNSW
- Students can have their own profile and groups
- Students can listen to podcasts of lectures
- Students can upload files and photos
- Course reading material is available for download (this has increased students actually doing the readings, as they read the course documents with their iPhone on the bus to uni)
- Teachers can have their own private group for communication and discussions.
8pm: Joomla day discussion
Venue:
- Possibly COFA @ UNSW during mid semester breaks (This is 5 Sep to 13 Sep, 2009 - my.unsw.edu.au/student/resources/AcademicCalendar.html )
- Australian Technology Park – Dex found this to be the cheapest
- Carriage works suggested, has wireless connection. Walking distance from Redfern station
Format:
- Streamed – splitting advanced and beginner users and running talks simultaneously in separate rooms.
- Half day for beginners and half for advanced
- All together, with 5 to 10 minutes of advance features at end of each topic
Joomla Day Sydney Website:
- Any volunteers to help built it?
- Dex hopes to implement Jomsocial into it.
- Users would like polls to vote on topics for Joomla day.
- We would like a forum available to discuss further topics.
Weekend vs Weekday:
- 50% would prefer weekend – more accessible and available
- 10%~20% would be ok with weekday
- Agreed to keep it as a single day
What topics we want from Joomla day:
- Joomla Security – simple 20 minute talk will be sufficient.
- Real use cases of Joomla – what worked for clients – what didn’t work out and why?
- Internet Marketing – how to sell advertising space and track affiliates
- SEO and google rankings.
- Accessability, both with code compliance (w3c) and disabled users.
- Joomla template – using Joomla on other devices such as mobile devices, iPhone, internet tv, Playstation 3 etc.
- We agreed not every topic can be covered, we should have a poll on the Joomla Day website to see what topics people would like.
What would be nice to have at Joomla Day:
- An online forum, community during the day in which we can submit questions to speakers.
- Some sort of recording, whether it be plain voice (podcast) or a video to be streamed (live or uploaded later to vmode/youtube)
- Post drinks at the same location.
- Customised Sydney Joomla Day t-shirts
REFERENCE: Components used/ mentioned
Community Extensions
Forum Extensions
Other Extensions
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