JFusion Blog

Joomla has been working very hard as a community to work together and engage with each other to make Joomla a better product. Open Source Matters (OSM) the not for profit organisation that manages Joomla, has also been making a lot of progress in beng more transparent and asking for community involvement. You can read more about this on the following website:
http://www.alltogetherasawhole.org/

An example of how not to manage a community can be found at SMF (a free forum software that jfusion also integrated with Joomla). SMF differs from Joomla in that a commercial company owns the SMF software and that no code changes are allowed by others unless the SMF manager approves this. Joomla on the other hand is GPL software that allows modification by anyone without explicit permission. This was requiring JFusion to make lost of work-arounds to ensure the SMF license was respected (the previous official SMF-Joomla bridge was withdrawn because of license issues).

There has been a recent public fall-out between the SMF owner and SMF team members / developers. A letter from 30 SMF developers / team mebers (both current and former) asked the the manager of SMF to stand down and allow for a not-for-profit organisation to be created for SMF. You can read the blog post by one of the original SMF developers
http://www.lewisonline.ca/?p=426

The SMF manager that was appointed by original SMF developers, refused to step down and create a not-for-profit organisation. Instead she banned the team members that spoke up and refused to sign a new team agreement not to speak up publicity about the issue.
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=362862.msg2486763#msg2486763

The sad thing is that the original developers of SMF are not even allowed to make changes to the code or fork the project, as the code is "owned" by the commercial company. There has been some displeasure with SMF in recent times with slow development cycle (SMF 2.0 has been under development for 4 years), known security holes in the 2.0 RC where left unfixed for months (luckily for us Joomla can fix and release within hours) and some speculation about the manager taking a salary from the SMF funds. This latest controversy does not help the SMF community and is likely to further drive people appart. The best solution is probably for the current SMF manager to step down and create a neutral board to manage SMF, with a better software license. The current manager has spend a lot of time and effort on SMF, but the current controversy is undoing some of her hard work. But just like with children, if you want what is best for them you have got to let them continue in the big wide world without you keeping a tight leesh on them. Hopefully a fresh breeze in the SMF structure will allow healing of the community and allow this great forum software to blossum again.

Also see the discussion on the allogetherasawhole.org site:
http://www.alltogetherasawhole.org/profiles/blogs/smf-community-under-siege Thanks, Marius

I've released a Community Builder plugin that will display a JFusion tab on a CB user's profile.

It can display a user's avatar, profile link, number off pm's (only to the user logged in on his/her own profile page), and the user's activity from phpBB, vB, or SMF.

It requires at least JFusion 1.2.4. Note that this plugin does not sync information in any way.

You can download it via our Downloads link.

Feel free to post questions in the General Support forum and report bugs at http://code.jfusion.org.

Enjoy!

With great pleasure I am annoucing the release of JFusion 1.2.4. Everybody on the JFusion team has worked extremely hard to tackle bug reports and implement many new features. From the changelog below you can see for yourself on how fast the JFusion development is going.

To update to the latest jfusion version, click the upgrade button in your jfusion version checker or download the 1.2.4 package from the jfusion website and install it in your joomla installer (no uninstall of jfusion needed).

JFusion 1.2.4 Changelog

Overall:
1. All frameless links in phpbb, vb, and smf should now be WC3 compliant (see revision log 1932)
2. Reverted revision r1844 as it was causing issues with the login checker and with some slave plugins not being logged in. If the system plugin was enabled while running SMF, this meant that login was impossible (SMF was not logged in and the system plugin then logged out joomla).
3. changed ergi (depreciated in php 5.3) to preg_match to suppress any depreciated warning messages
4. Added catches to prevent blocking or inactivating Super Admins in joomla_int.
5. Fixed an issue where joomla_int's createSession allowed a session/login to be created even if the user was assigned to the Public Frontend or Public Backend groups.
6. Added a few missing lang strings for the front end login process.
7. Changed the user plugin to only call Joomla int's createSession if logging in via Joomla's backend (but not the login checker) and return the result. This prevents backend lockouts due to the user being blocked or inactivated in the master plugin (1.2.x) or any preceding plugin (2.0).
8. Added a check to make sure jfile always has an extention to prevent error messages when using the SEF .html extention mode of Joomla.
9. Create a separate setVar statement for the jfusion_route param, to prevent this parameter (used to determine urls in gallery2 frameless) showing up on installs running joomfish.
10. Fixed: notification error where not return reference
11. Fixed some language typos
12. Changed JFusionFunction::getPluginURL to return xhtml compliant urls by default. Updated the few places to reflect this change where xhtml urls should no be used. Fixed other miscellaneous xhtml incompliant issues.
13. Changed JURI::root() in syncoptions view to JFusionFunction::getJoomlaURL() to account for JURI limitations such as determining https.
14. loginchecker: show jfusion debug info only for the jfusion user plugin. Added error check.
15. Fixed: error message for delete history.
16. Fixed: Error with resolve user problem was that the user did not sellect a sync id when pressing "Resolve errors" in the user sync history. now it will go back to user sync history and then display error message if this error is made.
17. Updated JFusionFunction::getAltAvatar to return absolute links so as to not have issues with SEF pages if live_site is not set in Joomla's config file.
18. Add jnodeid parameter detection in jfusion user plugin
19. Changed system plugin to call onAfterDispatch rather than onAfterInitialise to prevent calling keepalive functions twice in situations like logging in.
20. model.curl: Copied last changes from trunk version. Allows form input fields without a type definition (sic!)
21. model.curl: Repaired a 'strict' php warning message caused by one of the latest changes in the curl routines
22. suppressed a possible notice in the login checker
23. fixed issue with advanced usergroup always being updated due to misspelled variable name
24. Fixed some notices generated by plugins using advanced usergroup mode if the master is changed.
25. Removed blanket safe html filtering for activity results (and CB activity results) as this removed essential HTML needed for correct parsing (eg. phpBB smilies).
26. Fixed an issue where Joomla's and not the master's information was passed into slave plugin's updateUser by JFusion's user plugin's onAfterStoreUser. This caused an issue for updating usergroups since the usergroup id was Joomla's and not the master's.
27. Also fixed an issue where errors were overwritten by debug info for administrators.

phpBB:
1. Forum filtering based on user permissions (for activity and search plugin)
2. Fixed a few minor bugs including discussion bot parsing, allowing redirect plugin to ignore mods, fragments in redirects
3. Fixed a notice generated by phpBB's getUser when $result was not populated but was testing against $result->username.
4. Fixed a couple phpbb sql errors for activity module
5.
6. Added feature to show a new post icon for activity module using a new function JFusionForum::checkReadStatus(). This commit only implements this for phpBB. To be implemented in other plugins soon.
7. Fixed an issue with phpbb group permissions for the Anonymous user.
8. prevented issue with phpbb3 usergroup being lost when advanced usergroup was called to update to the same usergroup, thereby deleting the entry from the usergroup table.
9. added get/post var backup to the phpbb3 session synchronising code to ensure that posting data never gets lost, even if a user waits a day before submitting the post (after opening the reply window in his browser)

vBulletin:
1. Gave option to choose a custom field as a "real name" to be displayed in JFusion's modules/plugins
2. Update to accommodate vB's change where it uses a specialized cookie salt to create cookie hashes
3. Fixed issue where the post date created by vbulletin was set for the future due to a misnamed constant.
4. Added feature for custom vbulletin bbcodes in posts to be displayed as associated html in Joomla article.
5. vB smilies are now used when parsing posts to be displayed in Joomla's articles. This means that custom smilies will be displayed as well.
6. F ixed issue with vB keepAlive function.

Efront:
1. Fixed Username filtering
2. Surname and Lastname cannot have spaces in front or at thane. trimmed those.

SMF:
1. Fixed issue where discussion bot created threads/posts messed up new post markings
2. Fixed issue with the redirect mod when using framess mode and in full sef mode
3. Fixed bad SQL statements for SMF discussion bot functions.

Moodle:
1. Some Moodle configuration files have a slighly different format if f.i. changed manually. Repaired

Activity Module:
1. Option to display username/name
2. Option to parse output as html, plaintext, or raw
1. Along with this, fixed the issue where html/bbcode was getting cut off when using a character limit
3. Option to display a "new post" icon for new posts for the logged in user (phpBB, SMF, and vB) (only works if forums are set to use the database rather than cookies; phpBB and I think SMF does this by default but vB has to be configured to do so)

Login Module:
1. Fixed issue where changing display of username/name had no affect

Search plugin:
1. For the forum plugins, option to select specific forums for searching

Discussion bot:
1. Gave option to display username/name
2. Fixed a few layout bugs
3. Fixed bug where if auto mode was set to create a thread only for new articles and the article was manually plugged with {jfusion_discuss #}, the discussion bot would still create a new article
4. Fixed timezone issues
5. Now uses Joomla's user preference or global config timezone setting so that posts in articles are displayed in user's preferred timezone
6. Merged prepareBbcode, cleanSearchResultText, and prepareText into one function JFusionPublic::prepareText. This funciton is used to format text presented in the various areas of JFusion. With it, gave the activity module the option to display results as raw, plaintext, or html.

100+ unique threads last week
It is a "flurry" of activity at jfusion at the moment and there the interest in jfusion is increasing every week. Last week we had a 100 unique threads on the jfusion.org forum. We made sure everybody received a reply resulting in hundreds of single posts last week. We also set the record for most users online recently. A total of 74 users where online at the same time on Thursday Jan 21 2010, which just shows how jfusion is growing as a community.

feel free to bump
As you can image it can be easy for a post to get lost with such a high forum activity. If you feel your post is not answered, please give it a bump to make sure it gets noticed.

feel free help answer questions
Of course it would be great if you have some jfusion experience to help other users with questions if you can answer them. The more we help each other, the faster we can get more features released.

JFusion 1.2.4 release comming extremely soon
We almost cleared the bug tracker and have implemented many new features for the upcomming 1.2.4 release. Thanks to everybody for testing and reporting bugs. This release will fix small bugs increase compatibilty for people running advanced SEF options like .html suffix, add user permission filtering for phpbb3 search/acitivy module and much much more.

Thanks, Marius

Hi All,

After a lot of hard work by the JFusion team, I am excited to announce the release of JFusion 1.2.3. Lots of improvements such as vbulletin 4.0 support, discussion bot improvements, cURL login model improvements, phpbb3 dual login white page fix (for the new phpbb3 dual login method), moodle fixes, php 5.3 compatibility improvemenst and much more. For a full description of changes please read changelog

We are now gearing up to the JFusion 2.0.0 release and will be blogging about the new features that will be made available to you soon.

Thanks for all your support,
Marius on behalf of the jfusion team