World of Xoops (WOX): WOX (World of XOOPS) Newsletter # 48 (July 2012)

Posted by: MambaOn 2012/8/1 3:30:00 15027 reads
WOX - World Of Xoops

Welcome to the July 2012 issue of WOX (World of XOOPS) Newsletter  (see here previous versions). 

The biggest event of the past month was publishing of the Roadmap for XOOPS 2.6 by ForMuss and Mage. You can discuss it in the thread, and let us know what you like and what you don't like. You can follow the development on XOOPS SVN, or you can subscribe to our SVN mailing list to receive updates.

This month was very busy for our Module Developers, with couple of new modules, and several conversions to XOOPS 2.5.5 Admin GUI. This way we are getting closer to having the most important/popular modules sharing the same user-friendly GUI.

And from the less pleasant news, our Server Host didn't renew our agreement about free hosting of the XOOPS site, i.e. starting in July we have to pay $100 for our dedicated server. This means that we need to get more donations!

How are we doing with donations?

In May we've received a single donation of $25, and in June $5. Clearly, this will not cover our cost. Therefore, we would like to call on the community to donate money to XOOPS Foundation, so we can cover the $100/month cost of our Dedicated server.

Please donate TODAY!

Recent Highlights:

  • Roadmap for XOOPS 2.6

  • XOOPS Innovation Award - for people who create something very unique and innovative for XOOPS. This time the award goes to  Simon Roberts (Wishcraft) from Australia for the creation of IP Log Module, to log IPs of site visitors, and many other modules.  

    ==> You can see our previous winners here
     
  • XOOPSer of the Month Awardiis given to XOOPS members who show extraordinary dedication to XOOPS, and go the extra mile for XOOPS. This month, it goes to Ali Nili (Irmtfan) from Iran, for his support on the XOOPS Forums.

    ==> You can see our previous winners here

    Congratulations to all of our Winners. Starting this year, all Winners will receive a free book of their choice from O'Reilly. Also a free copy of PHP Storm from JetBrain

Summary



XOOPS Banner

Please help us spread the word about XOOPS!! .

If you are a happy XOOPS user, let the world know - please blog about XOOPS, share your experiences with others, rate and review us on SourceForge and other Websites. We need to let the world know about XOOPS!!!

And if you're not happy with something in XOOPS, please let us know so we can fix it and improve! Better yet - help us fix it and improve it!

Remember - XOOPS is powered by YOU!!!!

01. Donations

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Donations

If you like the XOOPS system, and would like to give something in return, you can make a donation to the XOOPS Foundation! Simply use the XOOPS Donation System and use your PayPal account or your Credit Card to donate .

As mentioned above, your donation will be used to cover the cost of our dedicated server, and to promote and advance the use and development of the XOOPS system. The XOOPS Foundation is a registered not-for-profit organization in the USA, dedicated to promote XOOPS! All donators will get the Friend of XOOPS rank here on this website. Thanks to all the Friends of XOOPS for their donations and continued support!

Donations we've got since last newsletter in June 2012:  

  • Anonymous: $5

Thank you very much for your support! 

03. Team Reports

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In 2010 we've re-introduced monthly Team Reports from our XOOPS Teams.

Core Development Team

Work continues on XOOPS 2.6.0, with the team publishing the Roadmap:

 Roadmap for XOOPS 2.6

You can follow the development on XOOPS SVN, or you can subscribe to our SVN mailing list to receive updates.

Documentation Team

- no report

Module Team

- Several new modules have been updated to XOOPS 2.5.5 Admin GUI. We are slowly getting closer to release of Basic Module Pack

Theme Design Team

- New themes below

Community Coordination/Support Team

Standard maintenance of the Website, and keeping it current.

International Support Team

See Support Site Guidelines. Unfortunately some support sites do not anymore offer the quality of support we are looking for so these sites will have to be removed as official support sites and no longer linked to from the International Support page. This will however, open the opportunity for other webmasters in these regions to start and maintain a local XOOPS Support site, which is a lot of fun and you'll help a lot by spreading our great CMS to your area and language. To apply for official status, use this form (login required).

XOOPS on Facebook: join the main XOOPS group  on Facebook

Communication/Marketing Team

WOX newsletter, keeping press informed about XOOPS, additional PR

04. XOOPSers of the Month

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Our "XOOPSer of the Month" Award is given to XOOPS members who show extraordinary dedication to XOOPS, and go the extra mile for XOOPS. Sometimes they do something spectacular, but most of the time they just do something everyday, but by doing it day-in and day-out, they make a BIG DIFFERENCE in life of XOOPS community. And we thank them for that!!!

This month, we would like to recognize Ali Nili (Irmtfan) from Iran, for his support on the XOOPS Forums

Where are you from, and where do you live now?

My full name is Ali Nili (my family name (Nili) is really short in Persian!) aka irmtfan in English webistes. I was born in 1979 in Iran-Qazvin and I lived in that city for the whole of my life. Qazvin is a rather big city in about 150 km away from Tehran, our capital.

I moved to Tehran one year ago and now I live and work there.

How long have you been programming, what got you interested?

Its better if you asked me what is my job and profession. I am a chemical engineer and have graduated degree in Oil, gas and refinery with advance knowledge in commercial business.
Until last year I was working in an appliance factory in Qazvin.
Recently I started to work for an international trading company that has 4 branches in Turkey, China, Russia and UAE.
I'm not a PHP/MySQL programmer and I just have some basic knowledge but I'm fluent in MATLAB programming and have advance knowledge of chemical engineering software like Aspen Plus. Therefore I can read and judge source code and can tell you which code is professional.

What is your expertise?

I like to create easier and more professional algorithms for the same task.

In the whole of my life I follow easier ways for doing the same thing and I am successful in finding these ways.

What got you to XOOPS?

Around 2002, I needed to create a website for my favorite Harry Potter series. I tested some CMSs and finally chose XOOPS. From that time I've learned many useful things  

In what area of XOOPS do you contribute and why?

I like to make XOOPS a professional international CMS. So because I have not that time to learn PHP/MySQL Smarty, HTML, jQuery, and since I Know some developers who can write codes better than me, I prefer to suggest enhancements like solutions/ways for bugs, request features (tones of them in www.sf.net) and show the right/easier ways for doing things.

Also, I like to communicate the real end user needs to developers because IMO coders sometimes didn’t know what an end user needs.

You've been testing many modules recently, contributing solutions to them. What are the biggest challenges and opportunities that you see for XOOPS?

Smarty is one of the biggest advantages of XOOPS. Also XOOPS is really extensible which I like it.

The most challenges comes from developers not using XOOPS API and not being familiar with Core codes. Many times I saw they wrote 3 pages of unneeded codes that can be done with calling 3 lines of core functions.

The other big challenge is hard-codes. I really hate hard-codes and this interview is a big opportunity for me to define what is hard-code:

1- Any HTML codes in PHP files. Or PHP codes in HTML files.
2- Any smarty variable that doing more than one job.
3- Any file like image, CSS, JavaScript that is called with a direct link in HTML, PHP files and any CSS codes being in HTML files instead of CSS.
4- Any self-defined functions in modules that are already defined in the core and doing the same thing. They just conflicts with each other.

The following is a more depth/minor hard-code:
5- Any direct access to database and queries directly reading the table information.
6- Any module that do not read/recognize the local class and local files

If you could add one feature to XOOPS, what would it be?

I would like a real advanced profile module containing all features you can find in social networking websites. Current profile module need a huge development.

You can see my very old wishlist for profile module here:
https://xoops.org/modules/mediawiki/index.php/Wishlist_for_XOOPS_30

What are your hobbies, when you're not coding?

I like cooking, eating, reading books, watching movies, listening music and also most importantly - exercising. I was a professional swimmer (I was in the university team) but now I like aerobics, climbing, running and cycling.

I am really serious about sports. Maybe I forgot to eat but I never forgot my routine aerobic program. I'm totally fit.

You favorite dish and drink?

My favorite dish is rather strange and maybe it is a horrific dish for you! But anyway it is Kalle Pache. (search in Google to see pics)

I also like rumen (called sirabi in Persian)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripe I love traditional foods and hate fast foods.

What about movies and music?

Irmtfan comes from ir=iran mt=modern talking fan=fanatic
I love music, my favorite band is Modern Talking. I also like Eagles, Santa Esmeralda, Kitaro and Chris de Burgh.

If you could choose a place and time to live, what would it be and why?

Anytime would be good and enough. We just should find better ways for living and enjoying our life.

Who is the person that you would like to meet and why? 

In the living world, I really like to meet Ms. J.K. Rowling and the reason is obvious

But in general I'd like to meet many other authors like Alexandre Dumas (junior), the French author of some great historical novels like Joseph Balsamo and the great English author George Orwell.

05. XOOPS Innovation Award

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Our XOOPS Innovation Award is given to people who create something very unique and very innovative for XOOPS! We are clear that XOOPS can only succeed, when we push the limits of our creativity, imagination, and innovation to "infinity and beyond" . And therefore we would like to recognize people who create this "WOW!" effect, when we see what they've done. The XOOPS Innovation Award is not a monthly award, i.e. theoretically, there might be a month where we won't give one, but we certainly hope that this will never happen

    Xoops Innovation Award

 

This month, we would like to recognize Simon Roberts (Wishcraft) from Australia for the creation of IP Log Module, to log IPs of site visitors, and many other modules.

Where are you from, and where do you live now?

I was born in Hornsby Hospital in 1978, I grew up with a very happy childhood and lived on the North Shore of Sydney for my early teens and adulthood. I then moved into the Inner west of Sydney where I have lived in a number of warehouses and board houses. I now live with my wife in Dulwich Hill in a converted shed at the back of my wife's parents house

How long have you been programming?

Originally my introduction to computing was a commodore Vic 20, this was a 32k Basic Eprom computer when i was just 11. I use to plug it into the TV and it came with to introduction to programming books from writing basic textual games to math systems like mazes. I then became seriously interested in programming when an 80386 and a modem came into the house and I started access BBS systems in Sydney to post on Usenet in groups like comp.protocol and alt.nanotechology.

My first course on programming I took at TAFE which is the Australia state run education facility this was in C Programming and I had a family friend who work for a computing department in the defense force provide me with a license of Turbo C++ 2.0 by Borland. He also provided my first copy of Visual Basic back in version 1 of the compiler which I stuck at inversion changes up until visual basic 6.0 where I migrated on the release of .NET to the LAMP Stack environment since then i have been working in PHP which I learned in the XOOPS Keying well.

What is your expertise?

I study much of physics at college and took it as an elective as well, I would say now after contributing to the design of the internet like my IP Address Stratum system which the internet uses and having the full physics of the internet and society using it at my disposal, I would have to say physical abstraction layers or the physics of computing and the abstraction it causes my expertise.

For example chaos theory defines that 'every action has an opposite reaction.' So in an information system like the internet every action that happens within it has an opposite reaction outside of it, then our brains reassemble the message in reverse and provide things like the sound of the world from human and physical interaction.

What got you to XOOPS? 

When I decided to migrate from the VB6 and Windows programming world I had been in for 12 years or so, I looked around at PHP after a friend suggested I learn it and migrate cause I was reaching a stage of writers block with VB. I looked at Drupal, Joomla and a few other frameworks that where around in 2006 and decided on XOOPS, partly cause of the Protector title where in my research it would show that my clients would be safe from my earlier code and also the file base seem congruent with other systems I had worked on in VB.

What do you like the most about XOOPS?  

I would have to say the community is a big plus at XOOPS, although the forum can be negative at times, it has caused me to toughen up and pick fights less also the client base is good. I think XOOPS need to have some form of investment made in it by both developers and financially to fund marketing as it doesn't have much exposure or market share in Australia in fact many people I talk to haven't even heard of it and know of things like Drupal and Joomla; I am sure this is the same in many other parts of the world, if XOOPS 3 is an MVC and a complete rework seeming MVC is all the fad and will be for sometime I think if it has all it current features it will be widely used, but it still needs to advertise.

Why did you decide to create the IPLog module?

I decide to work on IPLog for Natalie Artmova from the Ukraine, she paid nothing for the development and it was done over 3 hours. She wanted a way of monitoring IP addresses and locations of her logged in users for security. This is why it is for a project she is working on called Mercury, I released it as Open Source to the community. People should use if they want to log the logged in users IP and location of their user base.

What was your most important learning from working on IPLog?

I stopped learning in programming many years ago, these day programming for me is I feel for the code and it comes out like poetry. However I guess the one thing I learned was to do proper testing as some people after I released it, reported a few bugs, I thought I covered that. 

What are the future plans for this module?

Probably all it needs is the guests to be reported as well, that is the only thing and maybe a graph or two as well. 

If you could add one feature to XOOPS, what would it be?

My tagged branch for XOOPS 2.6 is a must as far as I am concern to be released with XOOPS 2.6; it include PDO as well as database access for Postgress, Firebird and many other database platforms if you want to fill out the MySQL SQL to Pivot to your platforms SQL in the PDO directory which really should be called pivot in the database classes area of it. It has other features as well, but I don't want to see my hard earned code go to waste. Some of those features include, comment RSS Feed like WordPress, a sitemap XML Feed provided by modules as well as a file base cache for long queries and things like the config class so XOOPS does far less query per session than normal on the database of your choice.

What is your major achievement in programming that you're most proud of?

Still today it would have to be winning the Computer Olympics with my gravity render engine, this was the first time this competition which is now called the Western Sydney University Computing Competition had ran and there were 3 groups of people that entered. Microsoft got in touch and wanted to release something like it in Encarta for an example of gravity. We said because it was Microsoft, no, had I know about Open Source at the time I would have said yes. That was with my mate Chad who I have lost contact with these days

What are your hobbies, when you're not coding?

I like to give my fingers these days a bit of exercise on the ol'd blog when I am not coding, I also have some interests in Ethnobotany and psychedelics even though as an atheist I don't think any of them are a spiritual molecule use to trypt out the natives. Or hanging out with friends is also good. 

You favorite dish and drink?

I would have to say it would be a Mars Bar and a coke from Saba Tobacconist in Enmore, NSW, I like the chat that goes with it with Mr. Wing Hall the store owner. he is a good friend, and a great place to pick up some of my internet ready snuff and tobacco.

What about movies and music?

I tend not to watch movies they have become too deja vu for me but I am classically musically trained by the Duhurst house and college I use to play both the piano and clarinet. These days I don't have any MP3s on my system as I got sick of typing them in my keying well, so i get most of my music DJ to me on shoutcast.com - I tend to only listen to streams and quiet a variant of them but my two favorite radio stations on the web is www.idobi.com and www.digitalgunfire.com

If you would have a chance for a 30 seconds commercial with a message to the world, what would you say?

Here at Chronolabs, we control the transmission!

If you could choose a place and time to live, what would it be and why?

Probably right now at the start of DA (Digital Age). With the advent of modern convinces and communication I think most of the amazing discoveries are here and now.

Who is the person that you would like to meet and why?

Last time I said the Queen, that has changed I would like to meet Vint Cerf,  the the Chairman of ICANN, to shake his hand and thank him for using my ideas as a child at age 13 for the protocol he was working on after PPP called IPv4. Which has some of my concepts in it.

Who would I thank the most at XOOPS?

Over the years although we don't always see eye to eye and I have had to humble myself a bit and not take it personally, the person I would most thank would be Michael Beck (mamba). He has always been open and easy to talk to both over email and the phone and always there to lend a hand or ask me to do something. For his cherish friendship and guidance over the years, like you all my friends, I would like to thank cause without it I would have left a long time ago.

 

Congratulations to all of our Winners. Starting last year, all Winners will receive a free book of their choice from O'Reilly. Also a free copy of PHP Storm from JetBrain


07. New/Updated Modules

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08. New Hacks

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09. Security Issues/Alerts

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Xoops Security

10. YAXS, Sites using XOOPS

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11. Tutorials/Add-ons/Documentation

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12. New/Updated Themes

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13. New Translations

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Translations

XOOPS 2.5.5:

Earlier versions:

We are still looking for more translations!!! Can you help? See the list here

14. News from around the World

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