The Techjoomla Blog

I'm sure, many of you have already attended many standups before reading this blog. If you are not familiar with standups, below are some useful links.

https://www.blossom.co/blog/3-tips-for-quick-effective-stand-up-meetings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-up_meeting

http://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html

https://sprint.ly/blog/scrum-meeting-best-practices/

In short, a standup helps you to keep track of your team's progress on a daily basis. Stand-up is a 'self reporting' meeting. In Agile, the team members don’t necessarily report to a team lead. Its main objective is to self organize a team. According to me, standup is a great opportunity to meet all your team members at the same time & get an idea about the lists of tasks an individual is doing during today's schedule & whether any assistance is needed to accomplish those tasks! The meeting should not last for more than 15 minutes for 5-6 teammates!

Alright so we're convinced with standup meetings. We conduct standups daily. Everyday we come, we meet, we discuss & we work.(How boring! I felt really boring while even adding this sentence) We need to add some spices & have some TADKA(tempering) in order to make our standup meetings really interesting. Here, I want to help you make your standup meetings really happening using some out of the box ways!

Solr is a open source standalone enterprise search server. It comes with great features like full-text search, auto suggest, faceted search, database integration and many more. To know more you can visit http://lucene.apache.org/solr/.

Solr extension is a light-weight, very fast and feature-rich library which allows to communicate with the Apache Solr Server in PHP. To know more solr-php methods visit http://php.net/manual/en/book.solr.php

We have been using Apache Solr in one of our service project. The project is a website which is basically collection of artefacts, posters and other memorabilia from across the globe, importantly India. It currently has about 75,000 objects in our database. In addition, there are roughly 100,000 items in ‘masterlists’. Within the masterlists we have the list of people, films etc, which are the related data for the objects.

Joomla - CMS AS we already know Joomla is one of the most widely used content management system. We can easily manage the content of the site using Joomla's Article manager, ACL etc features. Content management extensions Third party extensions makes Joomla even more powerful. There are many widely used extensions like K2, Zoo, etc. These makes the...

Hello Pune Joomlers ! The JUG Pune gang is back with a bang post the Diwali celebrations. The November Meetup was on DATE and saw 8 enthusiastic Joomlers attend. The announcement of Joomla World Conference 2015 happening in India had got everyone super excited and all the folks wanted to know more. Parth Lawate, the strategic Marketing Manager for ...

Zoo is one of the best CCK extensions available for Joomla. It's a flexible and powerful application builder to manage your content. Especially if you are having huge data sets, Zoo can be an awesome way to manage & present it all. However with large data sets, manually adding all the data might not be practical. This is where the inbuilt Zoo import tool can help you in a big way.

In this blog, we will show you how it works & also how we solve a problem that it presents if you have data with lots & lots of fields. When this happens during the import you need to manually Map the fields in your Import CSV/JSON file to the fields in Zoo so that the import can proceed. However when you have lots of fields it a huge chore to map them all manually. However, with our solution, you can do it in a single Click! 

Lets how the existing Zoo Data Import Works ( Just in case you didn't know ! ) 

Data import done in following 3 stages. Zoo allows you to import data in JSON or CSV format. 

1. Upload CSV/JSON file.

While developing a custom frontend for Authors to manage their own content, we needed to let them delete their own items. The Quick & Dirty way of doing this is by executing some delete queries on zoo related tables. But that's not the right & elegant way to do it.

The right way is to use the Zoo API & do this in 3-4 lines of code against 20-30 lines of the dirty code.

In our last Post in the Zoo series, we looked at deleting records programmatically. Copying zoo item is not as easy as deleting records. You should have all the details including the zoo category of the zoo item which you want to copy. First, you should have all data of a zoo record. We have used the item API which gives zoo item's data & getRelatedCategoryIds which tells the relation of a zoo item to the categories.

Let's get the zoo records data first

Zoo is one of the most versatile CCK extensions available in Joomla. It's flexible & at the same time easy to use for end users. In spite of these positive points, there are times when you have to dive into development & Zoo APIs to develop your own custom views.

In this particular case, we wanted to develop a List/Grid view with Zoo ( of a particular Content Type)  which showed all Zoo attributes in a table view for easier data viewing on the frontend for content managers. In this blog, we will tell you just how to go about doing that

Zoo from the YooTheme guys is a pretty awesome CCK for Joomla with some mind-blowing features. Whats more, they have made it extremely easy to use for the end user. It can be easily scaled to handle all kinds of content management situations that you might encounter.

It's so flexible, in fact.. that we have used it for Variety of applications using Shopping Carts (with Quick2Cart Integration), Online Product Catalogs, Download Managers, Business directories & what not