Elxis Downloads Center (EDC) has served Elxis community several years providing extensions for Elxis CMS. Now, with the upcoming Elxis 4.0 stable release in mind, we need a different extensions platform which will accompany the fresh ideas Elxis Nautilus brings with. We decided to move the whole EDC platform inside Elxis administration area! Extensions for Elxis (modules, components, templates, etc) will be downloaded and installed with a single click from within Elxis administration area. Users will be able to personilize EDC, get notified for newer versions of extensions they are interested in, and more. EDC will be available for Elxis 4.0 Nautilus on the Beta version which we plan to release in 1-2 months. The current EDC site will be kept for Elxis 2006.x - 2009.x extensions.

I present you a benchmark comparison test between the latest Joomla 2.5.4 Emper (stable) and the upcoming Elxis 4.0 Nautilus (pre-alpha). The tests performed with the Apache's ab tool on my local development computer which runs Windows. The numbers shown might seem low, this is because of the Windows. On a Linux live server they would be higher but the comparisson results would be the same. A quick conclusion (we will go in more details later) is that Elxis is, at least, 4 times faster than Joomla!

A rule of thumb in order to create secure and solid PHP applications is to never trust data derived by the visitor. Some times input validation and sanitization is limited to POST and GET but even SERVER can be spoofed and SESSION can be hijacked. The PHP developer should filter all super global variables. Unfortunately some times, especially when a user has submitted a form, the data validation and sanitization part can become bigger than saving or sending via email the data. But this is something you can not avoid. What you can do is to make your form fields accept values than can be easily sanitazed. The easiest data type to use is integers. If you build applications for PHP 5.2+ you can use the build-in PHP's functions filter_input and filter_var.

In this post I will show you how you can have a different style for your Elxis site depending on the time of the day. To achieve this you dont need to have multiple templates. One template with different CSS styles depending on the time of the day is fine. A CSS style with light colours for the morning, a darker one for the night, and something in the middle for the rest hours. The actual question was asked by Andrrew on Elxis forums and I thought it would be nice to post a small how-to here for the other users.

PHP Data Objects is a very promising abstraction layer for accessing databases. My late work on PDO, cause of the Elxis Nautilus project, made me better understand some facts about PDO which I would like to share with you although I dont consider my self a database expert. If you just started working with PDO this article may save you precious time trying to figure out what PDO does and what it does not.