One of the most active projects in the world of rapid-application development with php recently has been Jake - a new bridge between cakephp and joomla.

Some hard-core php peops claim that cake is much more delicious than Ruby on Rails and can do a whole bunch of whizbang madness very easily.... so this comes as really exciting news to the Joomla community methinks.

At the moment, it seems that there is lots of work within the cake community to make CMS' using it, so as bugs get worked out with this new bridge I expect to see more cakers embracing Joomla and working on projects that could really add some neat functionality to the CMS. 

I'm still investigating the usefullness of Fabrik beyond custom contact and other simple forms with database recording and table-display btw...

Is anyone reading this familiar with Cake?  What are your thoughts? 

Funny how the same day I blog about Joomla being perfect for sites not requiring custom application functionality I stumble upon a fantastic new component that may well challenge that viewpoint!  

Going back a couple of years, there was a great forms component that allowed you to create forms and custom elements for them without any code... that got built upon and then seemingly abandoned by pollen8 out of the UK and a little while back I remember their website being upgraded with a mention of mosform changing names soon and getting way better...

Its now called Fabrik and could well provide some cool functionality for making more dynamic use of databasing with Joomla sites... I'm off to install it on our dev server and will report back with more info soon...

I'm going to be brief here, despite the fact that this is my first post in a while and should establish an excuse for my recent negligence in maintaining whyjoomla? :) ...

Part of the reason I haven't been too active in posting is because I've been deeply entrenched in the wonderful world of Drupal .  Its reminded me of something pretty fundamental about Joomla - you see, they're both great CMS' though Drupal is more geared towards online application development (making really custom dynamic sites that use a database characteristically) and Joomla, well, Joomla is really fantastic at being a CMS and taking people beyond blogging. 

It can get daunting, especially for newbies, when trying to plan a new site using Joomla - faced with the over-1300 options for extensions , the abilities of this CMS feel limitless but its important to remember that just because daddy said 'anything in the store' doesn't mean you should get the crystal vase you might break and put your finger prints all over.

I'm going to be turning my attention to posting info that will help people get started with Joomla - those of you who want to build some cool sites which aren't going to make you a web 2.0 gajillionaire but allow you to get geeking with ease...

Till the next post...

q./ 

Aurum3 is a Brisbane, Austrailia-based web production firm that uses Joomla on their corporate website as well as a few sub-domains they explore hobbies through - such as movies and new technology .

Aurum3's experience in 'identity' and 'branding' shines through on these sites - they've really made a good example of how you can easily pretty-up Joomla, without the use of silicone [ahem].

Their corporate and hobby sites feature distinct aesthetics but all exhibit Joomla's stock content display functionality - such as category listing and basic contact management .

Okay, so this isn't really a complex hack - but its something pretty much every Joomla webmaster can use; a way to limit the length of hyperlinks!... 

All you have to do is include a javascript in your template that will cut the link down in length and then set whatever functional variables you want by editing the script.

NOTE: only *linked* urls will be shortened in length w/this script.