Hey Shannon!
Don't worry that's one of the reasons this list exists, so that people
can ask questions about shindig. So don't hesitate Ok, we'd be happy
to help!
Will be cool to see a Open Social enabled Joomla, gadgets and social
gadgets make a lot of sense for a Content Management System where you
want to drop in functionality into your pages, it's almost a natural
extension.. so i can imagine it's a fun project to work on :)
As far as licensing goes, this piece does mention that the Apache
license and GPLv3 license are compatible: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=331
so i hope that would make direct integration possible for you in the
near future.
Until that time you could use the metadata service to get started. You
would take the metadata service to retrieve your gadget's metadata
(title, author, gallery thumbnail, etc etc), and use the iframe it
returns to you to put the actual gadget in the site ... this way the
shindig server and Joomla are completely separated and connected by a
common API, an action which isn't affected by either licenses.
Since your probably using Shindig PHP (since Joomla is written in PHP
too), i think you'll find Partuza a useful code example, it uses the
metadata service (though it creates it's own iframe's in the
templates), has most of the UI bits you would have to make to become
an 'open social container', and implements the custom data handlers
you need to create to connect shindig to your data back end.
So as far as directions on how to start go my suggestion would be to:
1) Set up shindig php and partuza on your server (or local machine).
If your (un)fortunate enough to run a windows box i wrote 2 guides
here that walk you through this process:
http://www.chabotc.com/generic/setting-up-shindig-and-partuza-on-windows/
If not, i hope your capable enough with your platform to figure it out
(if you know how apache vhosts and php modules work it's not so
difficult, if you do run into trouble feel free to ask)
2) Check out partuza's code and how it uses shindig through the
metadata service, how it builds iframe's (Views/gadget/gadget.php is
the main file for this), what param's are required for this iframe and
how to create a security token that the social data server uses to
retrieve the owner, viewer, app id, etc. This should hopefully give
you something of a clear picture how to reproduce this in Joomla
3) Check out the data handlers in partuza/Shindig/*.php, you'll have
to make a Joomla implementation of these to connect the gadgets to
your backend..
4) Start coding & have fun!
Ps, there's a lot of other concepts you'll have to get aquianted too,
like 'activities', 'app data', 'views' etc ... just wade through the
documentation and examples to get a feel for this.
We did a bit of a talk about shindig at the google io btw that you can
view online (only was posted today so good timing) that provides a
slight bit of information about it too:
http://sites.google.com/site/io/apache-shindig-make-your-social-site-an-opensocial-container
Welcome to Shindig & let us know if we can be of assistance!
-- Chris
On Jun 13, 2008, at 1:02 AM, Quinn, Shannon P wrote:
Hello all,
I apologize for spamming the list - I dug through the archives and
perused the website, but couldn't really find a central point of
contact for the project, so as long as I can converse with one
person, the rest of you are free to ignore me. :P
My name is Shannon. I am participating in the 2008 rendition of
GSoC, working with the Joomla CMS community to make it an OpenSocial
container. However, after several conversations with my Joomla
advisor, and several looks back at some of the other GSoC projects
I'd almost applied for, Shindig captured our attention for many
reasons.
I was wondering if I could be a bit more present in this community
by way of working to make Joomla an OpenSocial container through
integrating it with Shindig. I know there is currently an issue of
licensing - Joomla uses the GPLv2 license, which is incompatible
with the Apache 2.0 license. However, I understand that Joomla will
be moving to GPLv3 very soon, which is apparently much friendlier
with Apache's license.
That's pretty much my shpiel. Feedback, comments, and general
suggestions are very much much welcome; in fact, I'd love to hear
back with thoughts from anyone. Any direction from the experts is
appreciated!
Thank you!
Regards,
Shannon Quinn
--
Shannon Quinn
College of Computing
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
