Publishing with Dates and Times in Joomla 3.x (and Time Zones, Too)

I love Joomla like I love my favorite sweater: it’s old, it’s ratty, but it’s comfortable and does its job marvelously. Unlike the sweater, it’s not easy to replace. Also unlike the sweater, I know how to teach it new things.

When publishing articles, Joomla insists on displaying the date in the format, “day Month year.” Nothing wrong with that, but I’d generally want the day of the week, too. And maybe the time in certain categories, like surfing.

SQLite Support in Joomla

It’s been a while now that I’ve been eyeing the SQLite implementation of Joomla. There have been lots of teasers, so far, but never could I ever click on the “Select Database Type” field and enter, sqlite. Finally, I got sick of waiting on a release and decided to go solo. I would find out who was working on SQLite for Joomla, track them down, offer them encouragement and help, if needed cajole or threaten, and finally get a SQLite implementation that “just works.”

How Do I Get My Content Back?

Have you ever done that? Created a content item that is of sufficient length that your session expired? You hit “Save,” Joomla tells you that you are not authorized to view the resource, and you are left there with a giant blog entry that is gone for good. You think.

I had that problem several times. Joomla could react a lot better to a session timeout than by making you lose hours of work, wouldn’t you think? It’s easy enough to fix, too. But we are not going to change the Joomla code right now just to find a fix from this impasse.

Updated com_weight

I just tried out my old component (written some time in 2005, amazingly): com_weight. It’s a weight table written as a component for Joomla, as the PHP version of my programming test in different languages.

It all started with me trying to lose weight in preparation of going to the military, where I knew I was going to be subjected to a strict regime of workout. So I wrote something that kept track of how I was doing, since I really don’t care about my weight otherwise.

Write locally, deploy globally (or: synchronizing Joomla sites)

Once in a while, I am somewhere where even my Verizon USB dongle can’t help me get connected: in n airplane, in a remote location, in a nuclear bunker… In those cases, I would love to be able to work on my site, but how do I do that?

Enters Blogg-X, a nifty little Java app that allows you to edit content locally, and then synchronize it globally to a Joomla site. It even allows you to synchronize to multiple sites (or at least it allows you to write for multiple sites). See: that’s what open source is all about! Problem solved!

What is zoom.searchbot?

I just realized I had never published my zOOm searchbot!

As you probably know, a searchbot (search plugin in Joomla) is a piece of software that, given a search term, returns a list of pieces of HTML that correspond to search results. Of course I wanted my zOOm search results to show up whenever someone searches on my site, so I just wrote a bot to accomplish that.

To download, please click on Downloads to the left!

Who is using moszoomimglink?

So, I realized after the upgrade to Joomla 1.0.11 that just *MAYBE* my version 2.1 of zOOm was a *TAD* outdated and upgraded to slick new 2.5.1. Great job, guys!

I made everything work, imported my data into the new zOOm, and everything worked just fine – except for my favorite mambot, the trusted moszoomimglink, that delivers those saucy thumbnails that you have gotten used to in my posts.

Well, I went to work on the problem, quickly found out that the only issue was the invocation of the correct set of include files (which I found quite astonishing), and there we were.

Fixed moszoomimglink for zOOm 2.5.1

Well, it was easier than expected to port moszoomimglink to the new release of zOOm! All you have to do is install the new mambot after disabling the old one… Well, ok, not that easy, I haven’t had a chance to repackage it yet.

To make your life bearable, though, I can tell you all that needs to be changed is the initiation sequence. In the file moszoomimglink.php, there is a long list of statements like the following:

Resurrecting the site after upgrade

Again, an upgrade to Joomla – and again the change to sef.php reported previously. These security holes in Joomla start being costly for anyone that has done even minimal customization, and it start becoming relevant to actually change the behavior of Joomla to not require that kind of customization.

Mambo/PHP Weight Table

I was continuing to learn about Mambo and thought the next step forward would be to create a component. I learned how to do Mambots (really easy) and now it was time for something more complex.

Components in Mambo have two things in particular:

1. They are meant to be displayed as body of the page
2. They have an administrator component

I was struggling to find something that I could contribute in the area, then I realized it was staring at me!