For a while the main Joomla! social networking plugin was Community Builder, which we've used for a large Joomla-based social network. CB is ok but fell short in some areas, and it was necessary to stitch together a number of other plugins to get a full SNS featureset. However, JomSocial was just released today (by Azrul, the makers of JomComment and other fine components) and looks to be a strong viable alternative to CB for building an open source social network. We're looking forward to working with JomSocial in the coming months and will relate our experiences as we get more in-depth. In the meantime, if you're looking to build an open source social network or add social media capabilities to your existing Joomla! site, feel free to contact us.

Elgg announced version 1.1 about a week ago. We looked at Elgg a while back when it was young and a bit more education-centric, but it has matured into an open source platform with a good adherence to standards such as OpenSocial and OpenID, as well as an API. Feature-wise it still falls behind some other platforms like phpFox, Handshakes, or Dolphin, but the price is good and the look is clean.

Tired of iPhone correcting your IM abbreviations and other words? Two ways to do it:

Retype it a few times

Tip: if you retype something twice, it'll stop autocorrecting it. E.g. if you try to send "np" as an SMS to someone, iPhone will autocorrect that to "no." So hit the delete key to erase the "corrected" word & retype it again. The iPhone will autocorrect it again, so delete it one more type & retype it, and it will stay. Third time's the charm. Plus, next time the iPhone won't autocorrect it at all, since it is now in the dictionary.

Note that sometimes I had to do the "third time's the charm" tactic twice before an unusual word would stay in the iPhone's dictionary & not get autocorrected anymore.

Click the Suggested Word Box

You can also click the "suggested word" box (anywhere in it, not just the X) to prevent the autocomplete and add the word to the dictionary.

I was talking iPhone webapps last night with some other developers & the discussion turned to Javascript debugging. Thanksfully, most mobile web apps don't use a lot of javascript (mainly because they should be simple apps & mobile devices don't have the horsepower to do tons of javascript). But still, I rooted around and this post from Christopher Hill about enabling javascript debugging in Safari with Drosera. However, it only works in the Mac version of Safari, and you should grab the nightly build to boot.

If you're testing on Windows, you can get by with Firebug/Firefox for heavy & initial debugging, and then using Safari's Developer tools (enabled in the Preferences->Advanced dialog) and Safari's javascript console to echo out debug statements using javascript code like this:

if(window.console) {
        window.console.log("some debugging text");
    } 

A quick note to say that I'll be talking about iPhone webapp development at the PDXUX meeting tomorrow night, 7pm, at the downtown Portland Koin center. I'll talk about mobile UI design, implementation choices, and how to build a native-like web app for the iPhone using iUI and ASP.NET.

A very near-term heads up that I'll be participating in the RWW Live chat on mobile web development this afternoon at 3:30pm PST. I'm not yet sure how much focus will be on mobile web versus mobile native applications, but hopefully my perspective on web sites targeting handhelds and iPhones will be useful in rounding out the conversation.

FYI, those of you with a Ning social network can look forward to an iPhone-optimized interface after tonight's release. It will be an iPhone web app (not a native app), and while iPhones will automatically be shown the iPhone interface, you can go there manually by browsing to http://yournetwork.ning.com/m. While you can participate in the network, not every feature is available for the iPhone interface.

We're glad to see companies moving forward with developing optimized versions of their sites for the iPhone and other handheld devices -- while "normal" sites are often tolerable on  an iPhone, sometimes it's better to present a faster, more usable interface that focuses on what a mobile user likes to do the most.

Edit: the release has been pushed back to Friday, September 26th. Then again it's been pushed back a few times before, but we shall see.

I stumbled across two lightweight web-based database administration tools: php Mini Admin and QDBA. Both are single PHP files, so you can just upload them to a server, specify your database login information, and be able to browse tables, edit data, and do other administrative tasks without installing the effective-but-heavy phpMyAdmin or allowing direct remote database access to your MySQL server.

Note that you should still take proper security measures when using these web-based tools (SSL, restrict access using ACLs or IP, don't let users log in as root), but overall they're easy & helpful. Of the two, QDBA is more attractive & usable, but is primarily used to view and edit data. phpMiniAdmin is spartan but offers many additional built-in features like import/export, table optimization & repair, and other "DBA" tasks. Both tools offer a SQL query window were you can execute raw SQL commands against the server.

phpMiniAdmin Screenshot:

QDBA Screenshot