The GPL Myth: Opensource Is Free Of Charge

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GNU Not Profitable?This is the first part of an article duo about open source. This article is inspired by recent policy stipulated by the Joomla team that all joomla modules and components must comply GPL license, the license Joomla has been using since the announcement of its first official release in 2005.

Personal Impressum

In 2004, I attended a one day seminar about GPL license and the spirit behind open source community entitled “Free Software: Past, Present and Future”. Richard Stallman, the father behind GNU, took the lead as a key speaker. It was an interesting session. Besides the material, Stallman himself was an eccentric person for me. He came and did speech with long hair, t-shirt, and torn jeans. He reflected the word “freedom” itself. Did you see a glimpse of the word “renegade” coincidentally?

Free Is Not Totally Free

The word free has different meanings. If one cares to look up all definitions in dictionary, free is limited to certain terms although it generally means no limitation. From this interesting fact, let’s dig what public assumption is about free software.

In daily practice, free software is often associated with freeware. In fact they are a bit different. Citing wikipedia, freeware is copyrighted computer software which is made available for use free of charge, for an unlimited time. The keyword here is “free of charge”. This is the critical point which oftentimes misleads users with free software.

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Zend Framework On the Way: Sample Application For Academic Purpose

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Can Zend Framework do you a favor? Does it taste different flavour? If you ask me, the answer is yes.

As Zend Framework (ZF) is on its steady pace to the first stable release, more and more applications are [being] developed on ZF. This is also intriguing me to create some applications which are driven by ZF.

Fortunately, I was offered to create a system for managing final projects in my past department (it’s now recognized as School of Informatics and Electrical Engineering). Considering this as a perfect chance to show properly designed academic software and as a pilot project for other ZF-based applications, I took the opportunity and started developing the application.

Frontend view

Figure 1 Sample user’s frontend view

The application itself is mainly another CRUD application with some remote calls to fetch academic data located at different servers. The remote call API is customized to suit the department’s need. Currently it still relies on POST and GET based supplied parameters. However, it’s likely a custom XML API will be developed to handle the web service.

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Community Builder Advanced Search: Search By Age Interval and Avatar Only Unofficial Hack

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As I posted in joomla forum about my plan to release my hack for community builder advanced search, here I will give some notes about how to enable and implement the hack. This hack is made for Community Builder Advanced Search 2.0.4 (which might be later adapted to work with the upcoming 2.0.5).

Before you proceed

Currently this component only works in Joomla 1.0.x. It’s not recommended to install this component on Joomla 1.5 unless you want to provide assistance in reporting bugs and compatibility of this component. Please read the full article here.

What’s this hack for?

This hack will enable search for members with certain age ranges, defined by user. This hack will also add extra filter to show only member with avatar / thumbnail photo.

Who will benefit from this hack?

Community based site’s owners and webmasters who use Community Builder to power their community-based service.

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Modifying Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract::quoteInto to accept multiple question marks

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A nice feature from Zend Framework (ZF) is its robust database adapter. Although there is still some work needed to extend the functionality (ORM?) and some strange bugs I encounter when working with multiple tables, Zend_Db package is already good solution for my CRUD application.

In Zend_Db_Adapter_Abstract, there is a function called quoteInto which is used to quote a field value from an sql statement. Most implementation is in where clause like

$where = $db->quoteInto('name = ?','John Doe');

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Displaying Author Alias in Joomla’s Article / Content

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As a popular CMS, Joomla can be used to serve various purpose sites, from simple news management to sophisticated e-commerce with CRM functionalities. Now, consider yourself as a smart publisher who instead of burning your skin chasing for a hot article about kitten’s birth, decides to automate the process and let user submit their favorite news and article to your site.

You choose Joomla because it’s simple and easy to manage. Later you pick JA Submit, a content submission component available for free download at http://www.joomlart.com/downloads/ cat/free_joomla_extensions/ja_submit_2.1.html and after installing, configuring the component and put the link at your site, you’re done. Really?

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