You may have seen me on quite a few occasions advising against using Joomla! 1.6. You have most certainly seen that I was the first developer to embrace Joomla! 1.6 and my extensions were among the first to fully support Joomla! 1.6. Actually, Akeeba Backup was the first major extension and the first third-party extension ever to run natively on Joomla! 1.6. So what is that? Am I hypocrite? Am I suffering from schizophrenia? Or is it something more unalarming?

Time over time, users make an unsurprising feature request on the AkeebaBackup.com forum: “Can you make it so that I can synchronize a live and dev site without a full backup?”. The typical answer they get is “No, because of technical issues”. I was surprised to see that a trending idea in ideas.joomla.org is exactly that – not to mention that it was submitted by one of the people very actively engaged with core Joomla! development. In the hope that anyone cares to read, I am going to make the case against such a feature, proving why it is a Really Bad Idea™.

Disclosure: I have the know-how to create such a feature and make it work on most servers and most sites. I even have code infrastructure in place to easily make it happen, without having to start from scratch. This article is a breakdown of my research and spec notes when I was doing the feasibility study of such a feature. After reading this lengthy article, you'll hopefully understand why I decided to never put it to code and, most likely, agree with my choice too.

When I roam around the open Internet I sometimes find myself in front of nasty surprises. No, I don't mean what you think... I see code written so badly which, despite the author's best intentions, manages to somehow introduce more problems than the single problem it tried to tackle. One such case was a set of patches regarding alternative layouts about to make it in Joomla! 1.6. Since the author of the patch doesn't get the damage caused, I'll take the challenge to explain it.

I decided to buy myself a present for New Year's Eve, a brand new EeePC 900 16Gb. I bought the version with Windows XP, sold at roughly 300€ (VAT included), not because I am such a fan of Windows but rather because it was the only version in stock. Over the last two days I had the opportunity to give it a wild ride, so I just had to write about my impressions with this tiny gem! This, and stuff I tried on it as well

More than a year after their initial launch, Windows Vista - despite Microsoft's efforts to convince us otherwise - are yet another failure OS. Such a claim might sound propostruous, but let's talk some numbers here, shall we? I use Google Analytics on three sites of my sites. JoomlaPack.net (targetting techies and web developers) shows that 85% of the visitors use Windows, with the XP to Vista ratio being 3:1. The Association for Adult Education (with a wide target group, mostly on the lower end of tech-savviness) shows a whopping 96% of visitors using Windows, with the XP to Vista ratio being 4:1! Finally, this site displays the same ratios as JoomlaPack.net.

With a vastly different blend of target groups (and a very big sample of thousands upon thousands of visitors), it is quite clear that the XP installations outnumber the Vista installations by a disproportionate amount. But, then again, why is that?

I am not the kind of guy who rushes off to try any beta product gets on his way. I don’t even like Microsoft’s products that much; I am a Linux guy more than I am a Windows guy. But, as soon as I found out there was a Windows 7 beta program open to all, I felt the urge to enroll.

There are a lot of questions to ask. Is all the talk about Windows 7 speed a myth or reality? Can they live up to the expectations of regular Windows XP user, or will they follow the unfortunate fate of Vista?

As the maker of JoomlaPack Akeeba Backup – the Open Source utility to backup, restore and migrate your Joomla! site – I often have to face certain challenges. Like when a user told me that as soon as he transferred his site to a different domain, all links in his content would link to the “old” site. Fighting the temptation to dismiss it as a user error, I did some digging around. Throughout this journey I found out some of Joomla!’s link handling deficiencies, their repercussions and coded a workaround.

In this article I am going to talk about how Joomla! handles the link base and canonical URLs, as well as what happens when you migrate your site to a different domain, subdomain or even a subdirectory.

Thank to a lower work load today, I was able to read some interesting articles on-line, discussing the important role of the Internet. The first article was published by my friend Harry in the blog called the Network for Social Change. He discusses the transformation of NGO's from grassroots opposition movements to a new form of interconected citizens' networks, partly thanks to the power of the Internet. It is increasingly more interesting because he also describes the importance of such establishments as NGO's. The original article's in Greek, but I found that the Google translation works wonders!