ThinkingNectar

PHP meetup 08 brings to us a series of presentation on CMSes.

Starting off the talk will be Voiceroute. The presentation will be mainly on the SOAP API of Druid which is the open source unified communication project by Voiceroute. Vikram touchs upon SugarCRM which is another open souce CRM project. A demo of calling his mobile phone via a web interface met with a little bit of hiccups and was quickly remedied by a simple callback.

So Micheal picks up his phone. Sweet demo. And into the code. The demo simple made a click to call function, a SOAP request to the Druid API. I guess the code will be better highlighted when the presentation slides appears on php.com.sg.

Giving more possibilies to the Druid API, a few functions for Android is presented. While the second demo boots up, we were told to ignore the silly monkey wallpaper that was currently on the screen. The demo is a emulator running an Android machine and accessing the data on a Voiceroute Druid based server.

That sums up the end of presentation one. The Q&A was pretty short and the audience were informed that the Druid interface as created using JQuery and DoJo.

Moving on, we have Jamming with Joomla.

Zhenhao is the presenter and his experience with Joomla is around 6 months and the talk will be catered to beginners. Joomla is a fork of Mambo. And it is a content management system. CMS are more than a blogging platform as it have a work flow management system.

3 Building blocks for Joomla:

• Modules
• Plugins
• Components (MVC model)

The demostation by Zhenhao will be to install a simple Joomla 1.5.3 CMS from scratch (on a windows machine).

Hence you enter the basic MySQL details and only MySQL, and the CMS is installed. Of course as most CMS goes, delete the install directory or install script. Then Zhen Hao covers the different type of roles, namely,

• Registered
• Author
• Editor
• Publisher

A run and the 3 different type of users are created.

Moving on, we touched upon the different modules and there are a series of modules that are commonly used. Login module was installed in the demo. And the demostartion moves on to adding structure and some simple article submitting and show function to the naked interface that the installed Joomla have now.

The Author user logged in and created a simple article with the word “demostration” and that was followed by the Publisher user logging in and getting the article to published. Workflow illustrated.

Next, Template customisation was covered with the modules presentation tightly integrated and easily customised within the adminstration module itself. Component is up next and we will be looking at Joomfish. Before that, we have to enable legacy support in Joomla. Installing the component was was easily as pointing the componet file in the admin panel and the component is installed.

The presentation moves to a quick tour of the other components.

• Calendar: JEvent
• Forum: Fireboard
• Shopping Cart: Virtue Mart
• Document Manager: Doc man
• Community Builder: Online Community

Up next we will be looking at Drupal, presented by Daniel of Ideapreneur.

Daniel starts by saying that the moves from Joomla to Drupal simply because Joomla cannot do tagging then. While Drupal (then) can do tagging really easily. The title of the presentation is Drupal 101.

The demostration is also another one that install a Drupal CMS onto a windows machine. A Vista this time round. The installation was clean and quick and Daniel went on to talk about user roles where the admin can limite the access to the site by the different type of users.

And Daniel covers the theme avaliable for Drupal and he honestly mention that Drupal’s theme are rather sucky and Wordpress and Joomla have better themes out there to be downloaded.

Drupal’s blocks are next where a drag and drop feature was shown that the admin can directly play with to decide where each block will appear on. A much user-friendly feature as compared to the days of the “weights”.

Nothing much was covered for modules and Daniel was honest that beginners should steer away from Drupal and stick to Wordpress and Joomla.

Kien added that Drupal have a module that integrate with Facebook that enable a Drupal site to serve its content in a Facebook iframe. And he added that wordpress too have one plugin too.