Soapbox Engage Blog

One of our most interesting projects in the PICnet Labs is J!DIA, which brings together Joomla with the Democracy in Action database in ways in which we've never been able to achieve before.

Imagine the following situations that could make your members and supporters lives easier when interacting with your organization through your Joomla-based Web site:

• allowing users to login and edit their DIA profile directly within Joomla
• enabling members to be able to search a member's only directory stored in the DIA database, all within Joomla and without any wrappers
• adding new supporters in DIA database using Joomla, without needing to do so through the DIA headquarters
• allowing users to login to Joomla and view all their past donations and events attended that are stored in DIA

One of our fearless Joomla developers, Chris Garvis, is very close to putting together what we call J!DIA. This component will provide never before seen access to the Democracy in Action system directly through an organization's Web site. Before J!DIA was developed, most of the display of data in DIA, for most organizations, would need to be presented in the DIA headquarters via wrappers.

We've changed this paradigm for Joomla users, enabling the Joomla CMS and your Web site's stylesheets control the output, look, and feel of the DIA data in a format you completely control.

We're eager to get this out to the community as soon as possible, and once we have a proof of concept, we'll let you know. But right now, know this: we're about to make life much easier for Joomla administrators that are also using DIA.

And Non-Profit Soapbox users, you'll be happy to know this will be included in all our Non-Profit Soapbox sites in the near future.

More details coming soon.