I will  try to post the pictures live as soon as we get some decent internet connection. Fatport bailed on us so we are bridging connection using a Mac. Once again Mac saved the day

So far we had 3 presentors

• Brad Badly - Started off the day with an introduction of what Joomla is, what lies ahead in the future for Joomla
• Levis Bisson - Talked about the Joomla documentation and Joomla strongest aspect, its template engine.
• Explained and gave some tips regarding the how to approach clients who require new websites.

I will posting more blogs and pictures later on today.

Instead of just playing short video clips uploaded by users, they can strike some deals with TV Networks to push some TV contents through youtube.

Every month, there are about 129 million people watch short video clips on youtube. Had youtube offered some subscription based rich contents, I would bet a good fraction of the total monthly viewers wouldn’t mind paying for those monthly afforable subscriptions since they are paying a lot more just for the basic cable.

You do the math a fraction of 129 million paying, lets say $5-$10 every month is a lot of money. I am not saying it’s the best solution but it’s definitely a start.

• Effortless document management. It’s very easy to create documents. Simply click on the new  button and fill out the document details and then attach the document file and save.

• Categorize documents by assigning them to different Joomla categories.

• Protect the documents by assigning different access levels such as public, registered and special.

• Embed documents anywhere within the articles using the special tags {docs} doc-name-1,doc-name-2 {/docs}  or embed all the documents belonging to one category by typing {docs category=”category-alias”}

• Create many documents at once by using the multiple file upload features.

You can download this extension from Joomla extension repository. If you have any questions or issues with this extension you can either post it here and I will address them or check out rmdstudio’s blog for the official RubberDoc support.

Over the weekend Rastin (rmdstudio.com) and I  made a little app that lets you create badges for your facebook pages. It’s a utility app that beats the tedious task of creating a badge yourself.

To use it you must have a facebook account (duh!) and then goto  http://pagebadge.peerglobe.com.  Add the application and after that you’ll know what to do. You can also just click on this badge to go the application site.

Let me know if you have any suggestions or feed backs that can help me improve this app.  Enjoy.

Check out the event details here or check the offical event page at  http://vancouver.joomla.ca

Thanks to everybody who attended this event. Check out Tazzu Blog to read more details about the presenters and their presentations.

I’ve uploaded the pictures from this event to the Peerglobe facebook page. These photos are taken by Amanda Abrams.

Again, thanks to our sponsors for helping with this event.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. This project is maintained and funded by www.Automattic.com
www.wordpress.org

Invoke is an Interactive Agency that specializes in transforming ideas into tangible results executed within a complete interactive brand strategy. As a full service agency, they ensure you receive the best of everything - from a world class website to effective marketing campaigns.
www.InvokeMedia.com

Culinary Copik Multimedia is a distinctive company, offering reliable and cohesive Visual Communications for the Food and Beverage industry.
http://tinymassive.com

Culinary Copik Multimedia is a distinctive company, offering reliable and cohesive Visual Communications for the Food and Beverage industry.
www.culinarycopikmultimedia.ca

BlueFur.com provides fast, reliable and affordable hosting for websites across the globe through advanced technology and knowledgeable support team.
www.bluefur.com

Citizens Bank is a virtual bank owned by Vancity. Hi interest savings, low/no fee chequing and operates for the triple bottom line: people.planet.profits. It embeds corporate social responsibility into all aspects of its business, and gives a portion of its profits back to the community.

http://www.citizensbank.ca/

But there are some techniques that can be used within a framework that is independent of the overall purpose of the framework. One example is implementation of ORM that has been achieved beautifully in ActiveRecord in RoR. There are more such as MVC Design and  agile development Techniques such as generators and helpers

Since I started developing in Joomla and Drupal, I’ve been feeling very frustrated with a lack of good ORM in PHP. So far the popular ones are Propel and Doctine. Symfony agile framwork is based on Propel. But the problem with mentioned ORMs is that there too many configurations to be done before you get to enjoy ORM in your applications.

Yesterday I came acorss Akelos Framework. I haven’t tested Akelos throughly but what I found very intriguing  is that they followed RoR agile techniques very closely. Moreover their implementation of ORM is very similar to ActiveRecord in RoR.  They even solved the model association meta programming done in RoR ActiveRecords such as ‘has_many’ or ‘belongs_to’  for PHP. checkout http://wiki.akelos.org/many_to_many_without_habtm

That’s Very nice.

Come and checkout the first Vancouver Wordpress Camp on Wednesday April 30th at the NetworkHub. This event is hosted by Tazzu Networking, a community for knowledge.

In this event you can meet writers and journalists who use blogs everyday. This is a good opportunity to learn more about blogging tips and how-tos.

Moreover you can learn more about Wordpress, a popular open source blogging application. Some  bloggers will share their experience with Wordpress and show how to customize own blog using Wordpress plug-ins and other embed-able web widgets.

You can learn about the blog at the Tazzu’s Blog.

Our first speaker was Peter Armstrong the co-founder of Ruboss Corporation and co-creator of Ruboss Framework. Ruboss Framework is a Ruby on Rails plug-in that allows smooth integration of a Flex application with a Ruby on Rails RESTful framework.

What’s REST ?

REST is a software architecture design that describes objects as resources identified by unique URIs whose state can be altered by different actions expressed as verbs. For example lets consider a printer on the network as an object and the unique URI that identifies the printer is, for example, /printer/1 . The state of the printer can be altered by issuing different commands to the printer  through its URI. We can ask the printer to print something by saying PRINT ‘x’ /printer/1 or ask the printer to reset itself by saying RESET /printer/1. This method of applying different verbs to a single unique URI to accomplish different results is the principal of the REST design.

On the Web, Resources are described by URLs and the actions that can be applied to these resources are defined as GET, POST, DELETE and PUT. Since the current web browsers  only implement two of these actions POST and GET, in order to fully implement the REST design, the back-end framework must handle all four verbs and the mapping of URL to the resources themselves. In Rails 1.x a plug-in called Simply RESTful would extend the framework by handling all four verbs using the “_method” parameter and  mapping controllers to the resources in the Route Class. In Rails 2.0 this feature is part of the framework core.

In order to benefit from the REST design within the Flex Application, Ruboss framework creates a service layer between the flex objects and web services that binds a flex object to a remote resource and provides ability to perform REST actions on the object without manually hand-coding resource’s URI and the “_method” parameter.  You can learn more about Ruboss framework at http://code.google.com/p/ruboss/.

After a short break Gerald Bauer presented his latest creation, S9 slide show, a free web alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote in Ruby. It’s a simple ruby program that turns text written in wiki style into HTML slide pages.  This is a great tool to turn a collaboratly witten wiki into a slide show.  You can download and try S9 at http://slideshow.rubyforge.org/tutorial.html or check out Gerald’s blog.

I’ve posted the event photos at facebook and flickr. Be sure to check them out. Thanks to everyone who attended the event and for those who couldn’t make it for this one we’ll be having more events later on.