Connect your Website with SL the EASY way... a challenge for the developer community

I have a question,

Why oh why oh why, are we, as a development community, duplicating, triplicating, and quadruplicating our efforts when it comes to connecting our resident run websites to SL?

Wouldn't it be much better say if, one of us who found a webservices solution could easily share it with everyone else in the community in an EASY way, instead of having to hire his or her own full on development team?

Welcome to the JoomlaSL Project.


The JoomlaSL project is an effort to work together as a community provide easy implementation paths for SL companies (and the world) to connect their website with SL and provide webservices back and for in a simple way -

(want the same functionality as Bloghud.com added to your site?)
(want users to submit blogs directly from SL to your website)
(want social networking on your website that hooks into SL??)
Well, lets pool our resources and create them together!

Good news is - it's all possible!

So .. instead of re-creating the wheel each time, how about considering a professional CMS (content management system) for your website.

Ever heard of Drupal, Mambo, or Joomla? These are content management systems you can install on your webserver to deliver your webpage to your visitors.

Once installed, and connected with your servers MYSQL database, you simply need to spend your time designing, or selecting a good presentation template - (there are thousands) and then enter your content in your sites database.

Then, when a visitor visits your website, the CMS will deliver your content IN the template you chose -

voila! a nice website where content is separated from design. Don't like your design? Dont wan't to re-enter all your content again? No problem, just select a new template or move your website joomla modules around (modules are the place holders for your data on the template)

--- the benefit of choosing a CMS to handle your website are many. Joomla is my preferred CMS because it has been it has a HUGE developer community, there are hundreds of components and modules you can add to extend the features of your website EASILY, it is opensource, it's FREE! AND it has been rated as the #1 CMS in the world for the past 5 years!
See

-- there are already several SL sites running Joomla - mine is - but its still quite underdeveloped cuz I simply haven't had the time to work on it more seriously... ill post more links to other sites later

so here's the idea...

I challenge SL community to embrace these CMS technologies and jointly work together to bridge the SL 3D virtual world with the old archaic 2D web.
More specifically, I challenge the SL community to **** embrace Joomla! **** It's better we all concentrate on one specific one, instead of all 3!

If we do, we can start jointly producing Modules and Components to provide open web service solutions to share and totally expand SL where we need it to be.

So, you agree - good... now how do you start?
Well, if you are a developer, you need to download Joomla from Joomla.org. Currently there are two versions 1.012, and 1.5
1.5 rocks the casba cuz it has been TOTALLY re-written from the ground up - BUT - its not stable yet for production use, so, download 1.012
1.5 download:
1.012 download:

Just upload it to your webserver, and load the page
Here is a template tutorial: (but do a search for Joomla templates and you'll find tones already available):

Once you get familiar with that, you can package your wonderful PHP creations into modules and components - and contribute to the efforts of bridging SL with the 2D web.. and we can all live happier lives.

Next, you'll have to try and glue the community together - like I am - so we can all help each other -

Here is the user guide for joomla:
Here is the developer page:
Here is a link to all the wonderful extensions:

Good news: Out of the gate running!
Fortunetally, we have a bit of a head start, a few months ago, I planted this same seed in the Joomla.org forums, and luckily a few people actually picked up the seed and plated it! GP Runo, has made an SL "JoomlaSL" Terminal for Joomla 1.5 that authenticates the avatar with his joomla webpage! And - he's released it Open source.

Here is the code Joomla 1.5 Authentication Code


He's also take then time to draw an XML authentication chart.


Ive also created a blog for interested developers at: joomlaSL.blogspot.com. If you start joomlaSL development, contact me, and ill add you as an author to the blog.

I've also created a facebook group called JoomlaSL to facilitate the group.


AND - ive allocated space for the JoomlaSL Opensource headquarters on my island at English Village.


Convinced yet! Let's bridge the gap and work together!!!

One last thing:
here is the original Forum thread I planted in the joomla Forums:

And here is the active one:

See you soon!
Fire">www.yoursite.com/install.php[/ url]

A really nice installer will take you through the steps of setting it up, just need to specify your database user names and passwords. Then it takes care of the rest. If you are successful, you will be able to login and start adding the content and selecting your template etc.

You'll next need to go through the hello world tutorials of how to make a module, and component.

Here is a template tutorial: (but do a search for Joomla templates and you'll find tones already available):

Once you get familiar with that, you can package your wonderful PHP creations into modules and components - and contribute to the efforts of bridging SL with the 2D web.. and we can all live happier lives.

Next, you'll have to try and glue the community together - like I am - so we can all help each other -

Here is the user guide for joomla:
Here is the developer page:
Here is a link to all the wonderful extensions:

Good news: Out of the gate running!
Fortunetally, we have a bit of a head start, a few months ago, I planted this same seed in the Joomla.org forums, and luckily a few people actually picked up the seed and plated it! GP Runo, has made an SL "JoomlaSL" Terminal for Joomla 1.5 that authenticates the avatar with his joomla webpage! And - he's released it Open source.

Here is the code Joomla 1.5 Authentication Code


He's also take then time to draw an XML authentication chart.


Ive also created a blog for interested developers at: joomlaSL.blogspot.com. If you start joomlaSL development, contact me, and ill add you as an author to the blog.

I've also created a facebook group called JoomlaSL to facilitate the group.


AND - ive allocated space for the JoomlaSL Opensource headquarters on my island at English Village.


Convinced yet! Let's bridge the gap and work together!!!

One last thing:
here is the original Forum thread I planted in the joomla Forums:

And here is the active one:

See you soon!
Fire

Wow, you have been busy!!!

Sounds like a great venture and you are to be applauded in trying to make a common gateway between the 2D web and the 3D environment of SL.

Although I am not at your level of understanding in this, is my impression that this is not unlike the system that DreamWeaverMX uses to link database content with placeholders in templated html pages?

Apart from utilising media content links into SL, and seen many excellent attempts at getting web based content to render within SL, how are you intending to 'port' your content? The key to the future of the 3D web, must lay squarely on this linking method being transparent to the user and port a huge proportion of ready made content, without reconfiguring on the part of the creator (remembers hours spent rewritting webpages for mobile phone and handheld devices).

Or have I missed the message completely?

Thanks AWM Mars!

You are correct, it works like DreamWeaverMX's html database template system, however, since its opensource, the development community is much larger and more vibrant then the commercial DreamWeaver product.

it also has two things i dont think DreamWeaver has - and that is a module and component feature. Modules are basically "blocks" where content goes. These modules can be placed on all, or individual pages of your website. For example, say you programmed a "Second Life Online Status" module - that showed when you were on and offline. In your template, you can specify where modules can be placed. Then, when you publish your module, you can select where it should be. Ie: in the left column at the top (say you called this position `user1') or you could choose to place that module somewhere else. You could also specify WHICH pages the module is displayed. Say you have a forums link in your menu... and the forum takes up the entire width of the screen - then you probably dont want to show your "SL online status" module there, so... you simply configure joomla to not display the module on the forums page.

Its really that simple. So... in summary, Joomla empowers the website owner to take control of their content. In DreamWeaverMX, you would have to much around with the HTML inorder to specify where the module gets placed EACH time you make a change. With Joomla, you could simply load a new template with the standard module palcement names in it - and BOOM! Your module would be displayed...

uh oh, dont like where the template designer placed the "user1" module position, no problem, you can easily select another module position in the administrator section.

The next thing which is cool, are Joomla Components. These expand the functionality of your website... for example, Forum packages have been created to plug into joomla, member list components, and private messaging, and chat components too..

so... it has much more capability then DreamWeaver MX, less to administer
less to develop.




Its now 1:30 am here, and i have to teach in the early morning, Ill answer this one tomorrow!

Cheers AWM - and ... PS

Spread the NEWS about JoomlaSL!!!!!!

We are looking in to connecting a joomla store to SL. I think that would highly simplify the process of creating a webbased SL store. I heard others were looking in to this as well.

Tam Wyler

Great Tam, there are already a few FREE marketplace components available for Joomla... you might want to look into these - ill be doing the same!

Virtuemart is the best current shopping component available for joomla

Hey Cold, it was nice to meet you at the JoomlaSl headquarters on my island today. I am going to put together a JoomlaSL member wall so we can all easily stay in contact! Ive seen virtue mart - its pretty cool!
Here is the link: http://www.virtuemart.org/

ignore this post.

nothing to add, but i like the topic. just posting to get newpost alerts to my email. thx.

Recently it was asked to me in world, what is the practical reason for doing this, here was the question:



Here was my answer:

So, how would the content be re-presented from Joomla to SL?

Would it be just a bunch of boxes with llSetText or something similar displaying the posted/updated data?

... or would it be fancy, as in:

dynamic 3d "room" for each type of joomla template, and placement of content, slightly more creatively ?

I'm a bit unsure about exactly how this works - could you clarify?

In most cases, connecting an web application to SL is just a matter of writing PHP scripts that the SL objects can make requests to, usually to update a database or return data from it. There's no presentation layer involved in this, because the data is just going to be read as a string and parsed by the object. So how does Jooma get involved?

I think the idea is to link actual data from a Web site, rather than just using a Web server as a data storage system.

Specifically, they want to link to content that is already managed by Jooma.

I don't see much need for it myself, but everyone has different plans for SL.

Yes, I agree with latest posts... I dont get the point.
Communications between SL and any webserver are made using some kind of scripts (PHP, VBScript or whatever), that dont need a "contents template", but just "contents" (more often I would say just some data).

Or the purpose is to handle just a blog? Meh... I guess I'm still missing the point...

Sounds like the proverbial "solution in search of a problem".

Not necessarily a bad thing; I write lots of library code which does neat things, but isn't terribly useful in itself -- yet.

Maybe you can come up with some useful examples to help folks identify with the coolness of the concept.

Hi everyone,

Joomla is not just a templating system - the power in joomla lies in the large module and component libraries that can be added to your joomla website to EXTEND it's features.

you are correct that connecting a website is done with a few php scripts etc, but the idea here is,

instead of everyone creating their own version of a php script to connect to transfer data back and forth between sl and your website, use a community developed and tested module or component instead.

It's a development platform to use so we aren't all re-creating the wheel.

Practical example: Reg-api.

Currently, there are a few buggy php scripts made available so the regapi can be integrated into a website. However, my programmer has created a module for joomla that integrates the Regapi on a joomla site. Now, (once we put the finishing touches on it) others could use our module to have the reg-api on their site -thus avoiding having to figure out the php themselves - instead, they just install the module that we created.

Now... run with this example a little further... what if other developers developed web components that integrated with SL as well... then we could pick and choose which web/sl integrated features we wanted, and plug those into our joomla website.

This project is an effort to jointly create web modules that would be usefull for each other.

-ie:
-web/sl marketplace - like slexchange
- blog component like bloghud
- object communications components...

basically, its taking scripts already produced, and / or producing new scripts and packaging them nicely into an easy install arrangement...

this is what this project is about...

cool. can you link to more info on this reg-api joomla application? this would be a concrete example to help us know what you're talking about...

This thing looks great! I can't wait for it to be all done =)

So if I can I wanna help any way possible...

I am a long time user of Joomla and have developed a few things, modules, etc. but mostly develop templates for it. I would like to get this running though and set up some sort of a thing. I found where I can get the server code in facebook ( dont even have an account there had to use girlfriends so maybe i just didn't know my way around) and saw everywhere that it said i could take a copy of the terminal, however when i saw only one terminal in your SL building but it did not let me copy it. I don't know if maybe thats a problem with SL or what. It is buggy as heck today. Anyway... I could not find the console code anywhere and not sure how to modify it to direct to my site yet, i guess thats probably in the console somehow but I just dont know where to get it. If you see this maybe you can somehow help me out and if you have any new updates or whatever. I would be willing to help any way I possibly can with testing things out for you and maybe some little bits of code here and there or whatever you need.

Very coool stuff!

Take care

Ryan

on second thought... being a month into second life and it being extremely buggy the entire time makes me wonder if this is a good one to start integrating with. and why i upgraded to premium. thought i would help them out but seems they just dont have the right thing goin here so maybe i will find something else that will work similar to this thing that we can integrate with. Maybe it will be open source and we can even help modify the code to work with Joomla.

Personally, I'm not a fan of Joomla, Mambo, etc. I much prefer to build a 'custom' site for my own needs...

...additionally, as the LSL to Web and back communications protocols are ridiculously simple...there's no point in not tailoring that to your individual needs as well.

I find the Joomla/Mambo usability resides mostly in casual-bloggers and small businesses not-very-serious about web applications. Anyone who wants to run full and versatile web applications generally goes with a ground-up solution that they can build (or hire out) themselves. I'd say the same thing about PHPbb and PHPnuke and whatnot, but someone would point out to me that http://www.slexchange is on a PHPbb (as is Apez). To that I just shrug.

In the end, my thoughts can be summed up by:

1--"Template" applications like Joomla, Mambo, PHPbb, etc. needlessly complicate a site by providing 'functionality' for a great many things that you don't need or just don't want.

2--The only reason to use them is if 1--you're lazy, 2--you don't know how to program.

3--SL->Web->SL communication is already ridiculously simple...no 'solution' is needed.

Yeah I agree. I hooked my JEVN servers up with my off-world IBM Domino Servers for sales tracking and customer relationship management. But you're also right in that this solution discussed here has a place for casual bloggers, and those without other resources off-world.

Yeah I see exactly what you are saying. It is probably just as good to write your own code sometimes and then you know exactly what it is, and it doesn't have to have all the extra things slowing it down and getting in the way. And its all yours.

However, the benefit of Joomla, or any other CMS, is that you don't have to rewrite your code all the time from the ground up and it saves you a heck of a lot of time. Sure it may have some extra things but that doesn't mean it makes the site more complicated or bogged down at all. The new version of Joomla is amazing as well. It isn't just for blogging. Your creativity is the limit. Its supposed to be great for developers.

The point is that you get used to the system and you know where all the code is, you know how it works, you can reuse it all the time for any project, thousands of other people are constantly making new extensions for it and helping to improve it. If you want to make a new site for someone it doesn't have to take so much time and effort to develop. It is a major major time saver. Why waste your time when all the coding has already been done? Why reinvent the wheel?

You say people might use it if they are lazy but I guess that depends on how you define lazy. I personally think it wouldn't be so lazy to not want to sit at the computer and code for endless hours when you don't have to but I know what you mean. I'm just saying that it isn't always necessary to sit and code for hours. It definitely is good sometimes to sit and code for endless hours, especially if you enjoy coding. It is true though that you don't always have to know programming to use a CMS. That is a great thing though because you don't have to sit and code for endless hours.

And finally, once SL gets integrated with Joomla there are endless possibilities. It seems like they already have it fairly well integrated but I am still attempting to get my hands on all of it and get it running.

Sony BMG is starting to switch more and mroe websites over to Drupal.


I have the code for a Drupal Module partially done that allows easy LSL -> Drupal Connection and Drupal -> LSL. It's not done but its in progress.

Drupal is written with this philosphy in mind. The core is extremely lightweight, if i remember correctly, the core is something like 2.4mb or so, the size obviously grows as you add more modules but the Core Drupal install is very basic and is designed in a way that you add modules to add functionality you want instead of having all the features in by default. Drupal ideals is also that you never have to touch the Core files.

Yes Drupal is also a very great CMS. Thanks for letting me know they have some SL stuff going on too! I simply prefer using Joomla most of the time because it seems easier for people to learn to use in my experiences. I do like how powerful and versatile Drupal is. I rather enjoy working with it and I am excited to see they have a fair bit going on with Second Life as well. They even have their own group started for it. I will have to set up a new Drupal install and see what I can get running with that too then because so far I am still missing a few scripts for this JoomlaSL thing which hopefully I will come across eventually

I;ve actually never used Joomla, after doing research for some other project on the diffrent CMS's i ended up liking Drupal and use it now for all my projects.

I will agree though that Drupal is more dificult to install and configure for the average user then most web apps. It seems to be more aimed at a developer crowd then the average crowd.

That comes though from the fact that all the functions of any site are broken down into a lot of modules, so in that regards, its lightweight and modularity are its downfall. Hopefully once it gets some good Install profiles set up more people will be able to use it.