Zikula Community

As of July 1, 2009, PostNuke, legacy predecessor to Zikula, is officially discontinued (End Of Life). There will be no further development, security-related or otherwise, of the product. All users are asked to migrate to Zikula, where further development continues.

This decision was made by the Zikula Steering Committee in the second quarter of 2008 and announced on June 6, 2008. As of this writing, the Zikula development team will begin implementing the tasks outlined therein. Specifically, the support forums for PostNuke will be archived for reference only and will be unavailable for posting (posting PostNuke-related questions in other forums will result in a polite request to upgrade ).

On February 2, 2009, the Zikula Development Team introduced a Migration Distribution which allows Site Admins to more easily migrate their PostNuke .764 installation to Zikula 1.1.1. (Note that the migration distribution will not be updated to current versions of Zikula.) This distribution will continue to remain available in the cozi download area. Additions and improvements to that distribution are added to the documentation in the Wiki (Migrating to Zikula from PostNuke .764) and support for such migrations will continue in the Support Forum. In addition, webmasters needing expert assistance in their migration may hire a professional. Please contact them through http://zikulapro.com/.

I’d like to thank Brian from Neosurge for donating the use of a powerful quad core server for the Zikula Community website.  As you know we’ve been a little strained recently under the load.  Brian (aka paradoxic) was with the project right at the beginning but moved on to run his own hosting and web-consultancy business since 2002 so he certainly knows his stuff.

The Camp of 2009 will take place from 14.08 to 16.08.2009. Our location is an education center at Georgsmarienhütte, a village near Osnabrueck in the north of Germany. This gives us new possibilities. We will have our meeting at the same place as the hotel.

The location is equipped very well. We can use the built in projector, use the wlan and DSL6000 connection at our meeting room. For Friday we rented the barbeque place. The kitchen told me, special wishes like diet or vegetarian are no problem. Just let us know at registration.

A few weeks ago, the localization working group was founded. This working group is responsible for package translation and I tracked the development of Internationalization of Zikula. We have a good percentage of the german, dutch and french translations. But there are still a lot of other languages missing. If you already have created a translation, so please store it in our extdb.

Another request: I am still looking for a second leader. Ideally from another international community with a good grasp of English.

Once again, Zikula will be applying to the Google Summer of Code this year.  We hope to be accepted for the second time, and to be able to take on another set of students.  More information on this year’s summer of code can be found at the Google Summer of Code website.  Our ideas page is up, ready for any interested students to take a look at our project list for this year.  Unfortunately, we can’t guarantee we’ll be accepted into the programme this year (Google will be accepting a smaller number of mentoring organisations in 2009), however we encourage students to get involved with our communty and consider any potential projects just the same.  More news very soon.

Are you a student looking to get involved in Open Source over the summer?  Take a look at our ideas page and consider getting involved in Zikula!

Or Seven Steps to Cool

By Craig Heydenburg (craigh)

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a whiz-bang-fancy login screen on your website that zaps down from the title bar and “greys-out” the screen like all those “big-time” websites? Well, with Zikula and a little outside help, it is pretty easy to do and quick to accomplish.

Assumptions:

1. You are using an up-to-date version of Zikula
2. You are using a Xanthia 3.0 theme (I’ll use andreas08 here as it is part of the standard download, but you can use anything you like.)

I am glad to announce that we now have a number of distributions available for those wishing to quickly download a Zikula package created specially for a particular usage scenario.  These are the Demo, Blogging, Content Management, Community, eCommerce and Enterprise distributions.

More about these packages is in the extended text.  To download any of these distributions, choose‘Common Distributions’ from the downloads menu above, and select the distribution that best matches your needs.  The distribution page in the extensions database will tell you more about the extensions included in the package.  To download, select‘Put into my package’ from the right hand menu, and the download in the top right.  You can modify the package before you download it by adding more extensions, or removing those you don’t need.

These distributions are ideal for those who just want to get started with Zikula and our best extensions without the hassle of configuring a package from scratch.

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Today I am pleased to announce that we are releasing Zikula 1.1.1 and the PostNuke migration distribution, based on the 1.1.1 Zikula Core. Zikula 1.1.1 is the first bugfix release for the 1.1 series, and fixes 65 bugs found in 1.1.0. You can see the full list at the CoZi. The migration distribution is built on the 1.1.1 core, with the 1.1 equivalents for each of the modules that were previously in PostNuke.

This will be the only published migration distribution for 1.1.1, so we strongly encourage you to use this release to migrate your PostNuke site. The 1.1 series is now very stable and few bugs have been postponed to 1.1.2. Meanwhile development on 1.2.0 and 2.0.0 continues, for those not aware 1.2.0 will be the first release including gettext and 2.0.0 will bring the latest architectural evolvements as we move towards a leaner codebase with more added features for developers and users alike.

For those migrating from a PostNuke installation we strongly recommend you read the upgrade instructions in the docs directory. Those running 1.1.0 can use the patch provided below, while those running 1.0.x should download the full distribution and read the upgrade instructions in the docs directory.

Download links in the extended text.

The german Zikula e.V. is pleased to announce another sponsoring: We give away 100 licenses of the ebook "Javascript Performance Rocks!" written by scriptaculous-author Thomas Fuchs.

Currently this book is in beta state, which means it is not complete yet and will see some update. Nevertheless the table of contents is quite promising already. The intended audience are javascript developers who want to improve their code. Included in the package is analysis tool called DOM Monster.

Long, long ago, but today is it so far. Web_Links 2.0 get a stable status and wants to see the light of the world. The successor for the Web_Links module from PostNuke works only under Zikula and is now to onehundred percent changed to templates and thus individually adaptable to each layout. Carsten Volmer, alias Herr.Vorragend, gave a new styling to the templates. A big thank you for this once again.

Calling All Extension Developers - Add your extension!

As of last night, community.zikula.org was moved to a new host, and at the same time we updated PHP so that extensions pacakging is possible. As we've said previously, the packaging system in the extensions database is incredibly powerful, and in future we'll be offering a number of different distributions for common circumstances. You may already have seen the placeholders in our navigation menu above.

However, packaging will only work effectively if every extension is listed. That's every theme, every module and every block working with Zikula 1.0+. Add your extensions and watch them get downloaded and used by thousands of people! The old extensions database has been archived and will be switched off in the future, so we strongly encourage you to move across to the new extensions database!

If you need a hand figuring out how the system works, please ask in our forums.

As part of our efforts to make it easier than ever to contribute to the project, the Steering Committee has decided to introduce working groups (WGs) for specific areas. The main goal of our WGs is improved transparency and separation of responsibilities. This should lead to an easier communication and decision process. We are also going to create a "who is doing what" page listing the contact details for each area of responsibility.

Every WG is either permanent or temporary, whereby permanent working groups should ideally have more than one person. WG leaders are responsible for recruiting any extra people they need for specific tasks. This does also include delegation to non-developers: WG leaders should separate tasks which can be done by end users and encourage them to take part.

The Steering Committee ensures overall progress and direction, while engaging in individual communication with the WG leaders. Furthermore every WG is encouraged to submit a regular report at the blog increasing the blog's activity and the group's transparency.

First of all, a Happy 2009 to everyone using the Zikula Application Framework. We hope the new year will bring you happiness and success.

2008 was a busy year for Zikula, with the announcement of our new name, the release of Zikula 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3, and 1.1.0, development of our new theme and the extensions database (more on these later), and a whole host of other exciting projects. We all feel that we've laid strong foundations for the year ahead, and we hope to bring more releases and improvements throughout the whole of 2009.

Although it has been a long time coming, we are happy to announce the bugfix release of Zikula 1.0.3 and the feature release of Zikula 1.1.0. Amazingly, we've fixed 144 bugs since 1.0.2 and a combined total of 83 bugs and features in 1.1.0, in addition to the ongoing architecture work on 2.0. Zikula 1.1.0 is a release that cleans up many loose ends, we've started the process of merging some system modules and removing the obsolete ValueAddons. This will, in the longer term, make the Zikula codebase more maintainable and easier to manage.

New in 1.1.0 are system initialisation hooks, which remove the need for Smarty plugins to load modules like Scribite - all of this is now fully automated. Also new is the ability to install different profile and different private messaging modules depending on your needs. Where Profile was previously a system module, you can now use alternatives like myProfile without changing your Zikula core. We've also merged the functionality of Mail_Users into the system Users' module, the functionality of Members_List into Profile and added several useful features to the Pages and Feeds module (Credit to Chris Fairman for the Pages and Feeds enhancements)

There are many more changes that would take a long time to mention here, so please look at the roadmap and specifically milestones 1.0.3 and 1.1.0 for more information. Our future releases will contain fewer fixes - you can already see that 1.1.1 and 1.2.0 contain far fewer tickets.

This evening saw the conclusion of a very successful bug fix weekend. Over the two days, we fixed a total of 28 bugs (with more fixes in the pipeline), bringing both 1.0.3, 1.1.0 and the upgrade distribution closer to realisation. Big thanks go to everyone who contributed to either the fixing of bugs or the process of testing, finding and filtering which goes on behind the scenes of development.

As you can see from the Cozi roadmap, 1.0.3 is now 96% completed, followed closely by 1.1.0 at 94%. 1.0.3 will contain a huge 131 bug fixes from 1.0.2, while 1.1.0 will contain a combined total of 80 bug fixes, features and improvements. Although it has been some time since the last release we are sure you can appreciate the effort that has gone into these 1.x series releases, and all while development on 2.0 is continuing.

Look out for further news on releases over the next couple of weeks!

We are pleased to announce that all the components needed to upgrade a PostNuke 0.76x site to Zikula 1.0 are ready for us to release the first RC of the upgrade distribution. This distribution includes the Zikula 1.0 compatible modules for every module released in previous PostNuke core releases, making it possible to upgrade your site one go.

After careful preparations and several tests, we finally this morning at 09:35 (UTC) have moved Cozi at it's final server. At 10:07 our Cozi was up and running again. The new home is a modern quad-core iron with enough space, performance and potential for expansion.

The upgrade to Zikula 1.0.3-dev is now complete - please do test the site and report any issues you find (just comment on the bottom of this post).

We are still fixing bugs on the fly, so anything reported should disappear quickly!

Hi Zikulans,

please note down the 6th/7th of December 2008. During this weekend we will primarily focus on the remaining core fixes for the upcoming cross-release of Zikula 1.0.3 and Zikula 1.1.0.

The community website will be offline for a few hours on Sunday while we upgrade the site to Zikula 1.0.2. We apologise for any inconvenience. The other websites will not be affected by this work.

The Cozi (code.zikula.org) will be offline for the next few hours while we improve hardware. When it returns you should hopefully see an improved level of service and a much faster site. This is also the precursor to a number of other improvements planned for Cozi over the coming weeks.

GSOC Roundup

Somewhat delayed, here is a very short roundup of the results of the Google Summer of Code here at Zikula.

zWebstore is an implementation of an online store providing you with the functionality you expect from a professional eCommerce platform. It is implemented as a native Zikula Application Framework (ZAF) module, making use of all the advanced features in ZAF. This means that it is not an external software platform integrated in a loose manner with the ZAF platform, but rather a fully templated solution which seamlessly integrates into the community, content, layout, user and security management provided by the Zikula Application Framework.

Continuing with the intention to make releases more often, The Zikula Steering Committee is pleased to announce the release of Zikula 1.0.2. This is a bugfix only release, containg fixes as detailed in the tracker

zWebstore is an implementation of an online store providing you with the functionality you expect from a professional eCommerce platform. It is implemented as a native Zikula Application Framework (ZAF) module, making use of all the advanced features in ZAF. This means that it is not an external software platform integrated in a loose manner with the ZAF platform, but rather a fully templated solution which seamlessly integrates into the community, content, layout, user and security management provided by the Zikula Application Framework.