CiviCRM Joomla v1.5 update ..

Thanx to Elin Waring, we had two of Joomla core developers, Rob and Louis, attend the CiviCRM training in New Orleans. We had a pretty diverse CiviCRM crowd attend the training and hence could not work as much as we'd like on improving the CiviCRM Joomla integration. However, I did spend some time with Rob and got a few ideas on how to improve and optimize our Joomla integration. Here are a few things we plan on doing in v2.1 to better support Joomla v1.5

• Use the folder tag in civicrm.xml to reduce the size of the xml file AND optimize the installation scripts. This reduces the size of the file from approx 3500+ lines to just 60 lines. This also allows the joomla installer to do a recursive copy of the civicrm directory rather than looping through for each file and checking existence and copying each file individually. I suspect this will help increase the success rate of installs on shared host. This change is already implemented in our repository.
• Use the upgrade tag in the meta information for the xml file and determine automatically whether this is an upgrade or install. This allows us to handle upgrades a bit more seamlessly and avoids having the user to modify a civicrm file
• Implement the onLogin on onStoreUser events for Joomla 1.5. This will enable us to keep the joomla email address in sync with the civicrm email address and automatically create contacts for all users logging into Joomla
• Use the Joomla createUser api call to create a user in v1.5 instead of our current approach of creating all the records in multiple tables manually.
• Unfortunately we would still need to write a joomla component if we want to collect "civicrm" details during user registration. This would make a really good contribution for the component. Please consider stepping up and contributing this component. We can help you with details and specs on IRC

Overall, I think the above changes will help us a lot with some of our major Joomla! issues. Many thanx to Elin, Rob and Louis for making this happen. If you do have some more comments/ideas on how to make some more improvements to the integration, please let us know. As always ideas and suggestions are great, but actual working code would help ensure it makes it into the 2.1 release

Comments

I think it's great that developers from my two favorite projects got to talk to each other, and it sounds like lots of good information got exchanged.

I'm also really excited about the joint Summer of Code ideas that we have--I hope anyone who knows interested students will encourage them to check out the possibilities for implementing these ideas and more.

Joomla!/CiviCRM project ideas

These are outstanding! Thank you!!