It's Saturday - what a day to visit jfoobar!

Using Virtualbox for web development and testing purposes

Written by Wilco Jansen Monday, 29 June 2009 10:50

As web developer you face the challenge to support a wide variety of platforms and browsers. There are some generic tools that help you testing, but sometimes you need those platforms to be available.One way to manage that is to make a multi-boot installation or use several different systems. That is one way to solve this "problem", another way is to use virtualisation. This technique is used to implement a certain kind of virtual machine environment: one that provides a complete simulation of the underlying hardware. The result is a system in which all software capable of execution on the raw hardware can be run in the virtual machine. In particular, this includes all operating systems.

I recently installed the open source edition of VirtualBox and it does exactly this; enabling me to run any operating system as a virtual instance on my desktop system. Installing is pretty straight forward, there is a windows installer for those who want Windows to be their host system, under Ubuntu (or similar Linux distributions) you can use the package manager to install it, or if you want you can compile it.

Virtualbox also provides a full screen option for the host systems. As I have a dual screen, this allows me to seaming-less run two operating systems on each screen. It is even possible to copy/paste information between the two operating systems...how cool is that? I found out that installing the guest additions, which enables the virtual operating system to run in full screen, install very easy under windows. Installing it under Ubuntu 9.04 is a bit more work since there seems to be a small error in the installation script. I found an article that solves that problem pretty quickly, check out the blog on nIxternal site for a brief explanation on how to make it work.

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New labs items for prototyping with Joomla!

Written by Arno Zijlstra Friday, 19 June 2009 09:53

Last week I've done a little presentation at the Joomla! Days NL 2009 about quickly setting up prototype sites with Joomla! and I promised the audience some tools to make life easy.

It took some time because a few guys of the JFoobar team are working on a great new venture at abillo.com but here we go.
There are three new labs additions:

• Prototyper Component
• Prototyper Template
• Template layout switching code

You can also read this post here on jfoobar that gives more information about the template. Joomla!, quick, rapid, fast, speedy and custom

Have fun playing around and thanks everyone for listening and giving feed-back.

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eZ Conference & Awards 2009

Written by Robin Muilwijk Wednesday, 17 June 2009 19:00

In less than one week from now, the 7th annual eZ Conference and Awards event is held in Paris France. Being the largest Open Source Content Management event in Europe, this time it's going to be a special edition, since it's also the 10th anniversary of eZ Systems as a company.

The goal of eZ Conference 2009 is to gather the whole ecosystem :

• Developers and customers using or interested in eZ Technology : eZ Publish, eZ Flow, eZ Find, eZ Components or PHP in general
• Web Content Management professionals looking at best practices as well as new trends
• Digital Media Publishing specialists, eZ getting a leading position in this industry for online magazines and newspapers

What I personally consider to be a big plus for eZ Systems and there ecosystem, is how they recognize there contributing community members and partners through those awards. Nice detail, I also got nominated for this years Awards in the section of "Publication of the year" on an article I wrote. A full list of nominations can be found here.

My personal thanks goes to eZ Systems for the nomination, and congratulations on the 10th anniversary!

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Upcoming Joomladay in The Netherlands

Written by Wilco Jansen Monday, 08 June 2009 12:22

Upcoming Thursday the Dutch Joomladays will be held in Nieuwegein - The Netherlands. As always, the organization has done it's best to get a really exciting program together. There will be multiple session about the upcoming 1.6 release, security, community building, templating...to much to mention. If you are interested in Joomla or a professional Joomla user, this is a must attend event.

Like the previous editions there will be multiple tracks, in Dutch and also in English. Like previous editions we expect a lot of international speakers and visitors, so the program offers something for everyone. The Joomladays in general are great social events, make sure you will not miss this years edition! Not sure there are still tickets available, but take a look at http://joomladays.nl or http://www.joomladays.nl/en/home.html.

Hope to see you there!

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Linux.com is using Joomla!

Written by jfoobar Wednesday, 13 May 2009 12:24

Linux.com has just relaunched their site, and it is build with Joomla! 1.5. The site looks very good, and has a lot of features showing the ultimate power of Joomla!

Brian Profitt explains the work done in a must read blog post announcing the redesign.

Way to go Linux.com!

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CMS Expo Chicago interview

Written by Wilco Jansen Tuesday, 05 May 2009 12:57

Amy did a very nice blog about the CMS Expo of past week. During the event I have been interviewed in more depth as a follow up on my keynote. In short the key ingredients (as seen by me) for the success of Joomla will be handled during the interview. Check out the interview on Ustream, and make sure to also look at some other presentations that have been recorded, there are some really nice ones amongst them!

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