My favourite links to get started

Have you ever tried a Google search for Nooku? Well, I'm sure you have and the results are in my opinion not really helpful. Try "nooku getting started" instead and you get quite some valuable results. No, don't worry, I'm not going to write another blog post about this issue. Instead I'd like to highlight the most valuable ones from my perspective for you.

Nooku Framework Wiki on Assembla - You should really start reading here. After some time this wiki has become an interesting  ressource for your first Nooku steps. It provides info about how to install Nooku on your server and some basic info about the general structure.

Installing Nooku with the Symlinker - Maybe the most interesting blog post by BEDRE reklame in Norway with a structured description on how to install Nooku using the symlinker.

Nooku related posts on BEDRE.no - This is a growing list of Nooku related posts on both Bedre.no and other sites. Always worth a quick look.

Torkil Johnsen's opinion from July 2010 - This post is tagged under Joomla on Torkil's site but it is rather a Nooku post. He expresses his opinion clearly.

Torkil's Nooku related posts - This category contains just two articles at the time of writing but both are worth reading. Don't miss them.

Google group

Of course the Nooku project maintains a google group and a mailing list. I subscribed to this several months ago and I kept reading it ever since. Here you can find answers to almost all your questions plus questions you haven't even thought of. But it can as well be very confusing. This is the inner circle communicating here and they know what they are talking about. What sounds like a compliment is more the description of a high hurdle to overcome for beginners. My advise: don't give up too early. Continue reading.

Best info for newcomers

I kept the best for the end. Israel Canasa's Neutral Ground blog provides a growing series of blog posts with detailed instructions about how to install Nooku, build a "Hello world" style component and DB access related functions. This is a must read. I am sure there are hundreds of more blogs and forum entries worth a read. But I want to keep my list short and relevant.

The status of my Nooku efforts

Finally I want to update you on where I am with transforming JPodium into KPodium. I have created a project, generated the basic folder structure and a build script. This script installs my component in my Joomla/Nooku environment and enables further testing. There is not too much progress here, because I spent most of the time reading. But a "Hello world" is already there. Let's see what the next days bring.

Some history

I have met Johan the first time on the Joomla day in Germany in summer 2009. At that time it was absolutely unclear to me what Nooku is and how it fits into the Joomla environment. Too many different people were talking about it and some were absolutely not talking about it. Reading the forum on joomla.org and following the bug squad mailing list showed that there was a huge disagreement on how to proceed with Joomla. I did not see much progress and JPodium was not much more than a rough idea at that time. Something complicated like Nooku was way beyond what I thought I could handle. I anyway got access to the Google group and started to read the discussions there.

No, it was not easy for me to follow. And I made at least three unsuccesful attempts to get it all up and running on my system. Then I gave up. Or I did not have time because my job did not leave any room for further development on JPodium and for tests with Nooku.

J and Beyond early 2010 was another remarkable push for Nooku and I learned a lot about the acting people in the Joomla project. More and more I came to the conclusion that the real progress is made outside of the Joomla core project.

After a few months of not too much time spent with both Joomla and Nooku I decided to give Nooku another try. I checked my local htdocs directory and found a Joomla test installation called JNooku, created back in the summer of 2010. I found leftovers of an early com_harbour version and some incomplete Nooku installations. Some simple checks quickly led to the insight that nothing was working.

The present

A brief summary: Nooku is installed succesfully on my normal Windows PC without symlinker and com_harbour is running. The framework is linked to a local working copy of the Nooku repository at Assembla and it seems to work. I get some error messages on the admin views and two warnings on the frontend. But for today I'm quite happy.