Zikula Blog

The documentation was once the pride of the German community, and we were able to developt it over time with every new Postnuke version. But the name change and the release of Zikula along with a lot of new modules were too much for it - today the wiki feels like a Postnuke museum. Time for a start from scratch! The new German manual can be found in the German community project in The Cozi.

Yesterday evening I left all Skype-chats in order to set a sign towards IRC. And indeed some others followed. But the IRC channel only makes sense if more people idle there. Up until now often new people joined there, said hello and left after no answer 10 minutes later. You have to be patient!

RSS feeds require a special date format to be valid. This format can easily be set with the string "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:00 +0100" (The last part has to be set manually to the correct time zone. +0100 is +1 hour compared to Greenwich Mean Time - which is Central European Time.) This is pretty easy but what do you do if you set your site to German, French or something else Non-English? Then your dates are being displayed with Non-English strings for days and months. (BTW: This is the stupid thing about the RSS specification)

Do you use Eclipse? Do you know Mylyn? It allows you to control bugs and feature requests from inside Eclipse. And the best: now also we can use it!

Since we first introduced the permissions model the internet and the way we use it dramatically changed: Our currently model is a top-down model. Every permission is passed down by an administrator. Today you have hundered of webservices where users decide on their own who is allowed to see their profile, who is allowed to join their group and how they can join.

As we just announced the next bugfix weekend we thought about promoting a nice little tool you also might find useful.

The Zikula CheatSheet is a collection of the most important functions in Zikula's templating system - All the little things you keep forgetting and that you looked up a million times in Zikula's documentation, in Smarty's documentation or even in the code... It's all there on one double sided sheet of paper.

There exit a lot of myths and misunderstandings about search engine optimization. Some tips are simply outdated information, some have always been wrong. And don't forget: there are a lot of people who take a lot of money for professional search engine optimization - so it must be some secret knowledge.

Axel and I learned a lot at the Mentor Summit about the way other communities handle their Google Summer of Code projects: Most of all we missed a chance to really include the students into the community and we like to change that for next year. One idea is to move Camp Zikula into the "bonding phase" of Google's Summer of Code and invite the students.

As you might remember the Postnuke .7x branch was called "phoenix" and Zikula 1.x is called "adam_baum" in remembrance of late core developer Greg Allan aka adam_baum. Now it's time to find a codename for the Zikula 2.x branch - and we pass this question to you!