The functionality of groja.com's Draw option is an original joomla! component named com_groja. The design of this component is based on joomla's Model-View-Controller (MVC) Application Programming Interface (API).

Joomla's MVC API gives developers a framework for developing complex applications.

• Models are specialized classes that know how to do something, such as store and retrieve data from cookies or a database.
• Views are classes that know how to display something, such as groups of forms that allow users to send data to the server in a request.
• Controllers are classes that know how to accomplish a task, such as validating and storing data from a form.

This article describes how groja.com uses joomla's MVC API.

This article makes no effort to describe concepts such as the MVC design pattern and object oriented design (OOD). There is already a great deal of information about MVC and OOD on the web; google and the wikipedia are good places to start.

This is a long and fairly technical article. If you are still interested in all this, click on the "Read more..." link below to see class diagrams that illustrate how groja.com uses this API.

A new version of groja.com is now online! Following is a list of the new features in the latest version:

• It is now built on joomla!, making the site more secure and easier to update.
  • The code uses joomla's API to implement the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern.
  • The site takes advantage of four user levels (unregistered, registered, author, and editor) each of which has increasing capabilities.
  • Using the mootools javascript framework (packaged with joomla) it condenses about 10-15 pages down to two! The mootools panes to allow presentation of multiple lists, forms, inforamtion, and option groups on a single page.
  • Now getting regular updates to joomla! automatically via the gentoo operating system's portage software management tool.
• Visitors don't have to be logged in to see an image of their personality - this version uses cookies to emulate storage of profiles and images in a database.
• Advanced users can post images to the site's content area.
• The quiz now contains 88 questions and contains a versioning mechanism that allows for changes down the road.
• It includes the ability to add a score based on percentages, using sliders based on the mootools framework.
• It uses a new template and component that allows users to customize how the site looks. Click on the More... option to try it!
• It displays google's adsense ads - so maybe we will see a return on this investment!

Finally, this version includes a gallery component, that will be enabled once there are enough images to put into one or more of them.

This weekend a new version of joomla! turned up in portage. 

Although this was a first for me and I have made some customizations, it turned out to be a fairly simple task to upgrade from version 1.5.1 to 1.5.3.  I made some notes and wrote a shell script to make this task easier next time.

It's beginning to look like porting groja.com from PHP Nuke to joomla! would be a very good idea....