JoomStew Radio – September 15, 2010 – Extensions Series – CCK’s
JoomStew Radio Guests
Matthew Philogene
Cristina Solana
This week JoomStew welcomes power CCK (Content Construction Kit) users Matthew Philogene of raramuridesign and Cristina Solana Nightshift Creative.
K2 and Flexi Content are two popular CCK components for Joomla! Both seem to have similar features, and today, our guests are going to tell a little more about what you can do with these content components.
JoomStew Radio - Extensions Series - CCK Shuffle
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Joomla News:
Joomla 1.6 Beta 9 was released this week - Andrew Eddie has reiterated that Joomla 1.6 RC will be ready when all level 1 and 2 bugs are squashed. Currently that list is around 30 items in the tracker give or take a few... but it fluctuates daily.
Community Leadership Team Summit - At JoomlaDay West in San Jose, CA a video Q & A session with the CLT will be streamed live Oct 4 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. They are asking the community to submit their questions and suggestions now! Visit the Joomla Community Blog for more info.
PLT Announces Andrew Eddie’s Paid Hours Will Increase to Double the amount for the remaining two months until his recently announced departure in October. This has created quite a stir in the community.
Trademark Team Report - The Trademark team was reassembled roughly 3 months ago with Marko Milenovic taking the lead and joining Claire Mandville as Domain Keeper and adding Dianne Henning as Logo Keeper to facilitate a much quicker response time to Joomla Trademark requests. They are currently looking for Translators in all languages, so if you would like to help the Trademark team on a global level, read the blog post and get in touch with Marko.
Drop That in the Suggestion Box - JED Style - The JED Team has opened a discussion on suggestions for the Extension Directory. They are looking for input from the community on how to improve the JED for Users and Developers.
Contributor of the Week:
Amy Stephen for creating the ATAAW Dev Group and organising the people formerly known as Joomla Devs.
Bad Boy of the Week:
Ole Bang Ottosen - Keeping it real.
Working in the Community:
Joomla Bug Squad - Join the Bug Squad in helping get Joomla 1.6 to RC.
The Joomla User Group Team still has JUGs that have not updated their listing on the new JUG site. An email reminder should be going out about it in the next couple of weeks. To avoid removal of those listings, please see that they are updated.
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September 15th, 2010 - 18:18
Thanks for the interview. It’s always interesting to hear different people’s takes. I would add that the reason Flexicontent’s templating appears a little tricky is because of Flexi’s unique (as far as I know) drag and drop capability for custom fields in the backend (so they automatically appear and sort on the frontend). Of course in order for that to work if you need to customize anything beyond the css, you have a lot of PHP to contend with… But it’s really a choice. If you decide not make use of the drag and drop fields, you can just start from a clean slate and make a simple template w/field variables just like any other system.
Also, from my experience, Flexi being more integrated with core content is along with ACL a very good reason to use Flexi… Not so much because it can revert back (which I would think wouldn’t be of much use anyway as you would loose all of your custom fields and layouts), but because of extension compatibility. K2 may have 30 or so extensions, but Flexi has 1000′s… I’ve seen that this issue has its two camps Joomla world, but I can personally say that for my business, compatibility of 3rd party extensions is key to saving time and offering the richest solution. Flexicontent isn’t perfect in this regard either, but Joomla extensions that look for standard J! articles and categories usually work with Flexicontent. Not so with K2 unless someone has modified them (which takes a lot more time and skill than you’d think).
If you do a lot of similar sites and you can get away with a small subset of extensions, and then I can see the point of K2. Plus it has a decent default template that works. But the beauty of Joomla as I see it is its diversity, and having that flexibility is what keeps me coming back rather then switching to a more simple and turnkey (but not very extendable) system like Concrete 5 or the like.
Jseblod didn’t wasn’t part of the discussion, but it is also a worthy contender. It probably has the biggest learning curve of all of them, but it is the most integrated with Joomla and can do a lot more then either K2 or Flexi (except ACL, but you can use an ACL extension or wait until Joomla 1.6 is released).
September 15th, 2010 - 18:32
Thanks for the insight Jason… I’m glad you clarified the 2 points about the template system for Flexi and also the joomla plugin integration, those are both important factors for me when using an extension as well.
As for the JSeblod and Zoo not being included, it was simply a matter of finding folks that can speak on their behalf without actually getting the developer of the extension in here to do the show. Don’t get me wrong, we will have developers on the show from time to time, but I wanted to try to get a sitebuilder’s perspective on using these extensions in real world site builds.
Thanks again for posting the comment, always great to hear feedback about our shows!
September 15th, 2010 - 20:10
Hey, thanks for doing the shows!