After my blog post the other day I started thinking how I could improve the portable Joomla training suite.

Currently at the start of each training session I provide the trainees with a USB stick with a suite of portable apps including XAMPP and FireFox.

This ensures that they are all running the same software and I can pre-install some sample Joomla sites to use during the training.

Unfortunately this only works for Windows users and I don't like solutions that exclude Mac or Linux users.

So what I really need is a Wireless Access Point (WAP) and a web server so that I can create my own training network all connected to a single web server. This will support all operating systems and prevent the regular sessions of USB Frisbee when I realise that I forgot to add something to the stick.

As a bonus if I could connect the server to the portable broadband then everyone would have Internet access as well.

Of course being a server it could operate headless (without screen, mouse or keyboard) but how am I going to fit the WAP and web server into the bag. It wouldn't be the same portable training suite if it has to fit inside a suitcase.

After a lot of searching I have found the solution a fit-pc.

A Linux web server and WAP all in one box 10cm x 10cm x 3cm (approximately 3.5" x 3.5" x1").

The system specifications are more than adequate for the job and at $300 its more than affordable.

Even though I'm used to tiny laptops it's hard to believe that you can squeeze a server into such a tiny space.

Now you can't get much smaller than that and best of all there is just enough room in the bag for it.

(If you followed the links to the fit-pc web site you will have spotted that they use Joomla as well so it must be good)

Recently I've spent quite a lot of time looking at how users actualy use a website, where the mouse goes, what the eye scans etc.

It has also been interesting comparing how users with a mouse work differently to those with a trackpad. So as a bit of "Friday fun" have a look at this experimental web site that I bookmarked some time ago.

Can you resist to click

[warning: this will either inspire you to throw the mouse away or to throw it at the screen.]

Today Andrew Eddie posted a useful explanation of the new ACL (Access Control) he is building for Joomla 1.6.

Whilst Andrew has tried to explain a difficult concept it was still written by a developer for developers.

So I thought I would have a go at translating it into "normal" speak.

Like any ACL system it is based on

• actions
  What can someone do e.g. read, edit, install
  
• assets
  What can you do it on e.g. News category
  
• users
  Who can do it e.g. Peter, Paul, Mary

Thankfully both assets and users can be grouped together to simplify things and reduce the workload in setting things up for your web site.

That means you can combine a set of assets into one group if they are going to be used by one user or a group of users.

For example on a Newspaper web site I put all my sports writers in a user group called sports-writers and put my football, rugby, netball and baseball categories in an asset group called sports-assets.

Now that we have our actions, assets and users we have to create the rules. These rules are the glue that stick everything together and give us our ACL (access control)

At the time of writing there are three different rule types but I guess these may be added to in the future. They don't have any clever names right now they are just Rule Types 1, 2 and 3. Perhaps they could be called jobs I'm not sure.

• Type 1 - A user group can perform some sort of Action
  (e.g. Administrator group can install Templates)
• Type 2 - A user group can perform an Action on an Asset
  (e.g.. sports-writers can Create or Edit content in the rugby category)
• Type 3 -  A user group can perform an Action on an Asset Group
  (e.g. sports-readers can View content in the sports-assets group)

The concepts appear to be solid and easy to understand and I can see that groundwork for the required code is all done. The challenge, and it is a big challenge is to provide a user interface to the system that lets you easily set everything up.

Things are really starting to take shape now.