Joomla & Google Wave: The Possibilities

Last weekend, I presented a talk on Google Wave to Joomla Day Sydney, and then proposed various ways that Joomla and and the Wave APIs could be used together. I've summarized them below, and would love to hear ideas from Joomla developers on other types of integration.

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Using Wave to Produce Joomla Content

Embedded Waves

You might decide that instead of static HTML for a particular article, you want to embed a Wave and enable real-time collaboration. An enterprising developer has already written a Joomla plugin that uses the Embed API and makes it easy to embed Waves in articles, so you can use that.

For example, I can create a Wave with the content of the Joomla Day home page:

Then, in my Joomla instance, I can install the plugin and insert this code in an article:

{googlewave srv=http://wave.google.com/a/wavesandbox.com/|id=wavesandbox.com!w+FspA8QgYA|width=100%|height=600px|fsize=12px|bg=#FFF|ffamily=Georgia}

And then it would produce a page like this:

Note: Only people with accounts for the embedded server will be able to view the Wave, and only if they are a participant or the Wave is public to that whole server. In the future, we hope to allow for another type of public waves that can be viewed anonymously.

You may be creeped out by the idea of anyone being able to edit the Wave, and maybe you don't really want a full conversation on the page. That brings us to the second option.

Exported Waves

If you want to use the collaborative nature of Wave to create your articles, but then still use static HTML for your articles, then you could write a robot to export from Wave into Joomla or a Joomla-compatible format.

For example, the Exporty bot listens for changes in a blip, extracts the contents of the root blip, and stores it in its App Engine datastore. Then, it renders that as HTML at a URL, and when someone requests that HTML, it displays the blip if its Wave was public, and otherwise it asks the user to sign in and checks if they are a participant of the Wave.

So, I can create a Wave with the content of the article, add the co-authors, and then add Exporty-bot:

Then I can create an iframe pointing at the HTML in my article content:

<iframe src="http://exporty-bot.appspot.com/export?waveId=wavesandbox.com!w%252B7w-1O4JSA" width="100%" height="700" frameborder="0"></iframe>

And then it would produce a page like this:

A more elegant solution would involve eliminating the iframe and baking the content into the page. But I will leave it to someone more experienced with Joomla to figure out best way to do that.

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Using Wave to Extract Joomla Content

Using robots and gadgets, you can find ways to bring in content from your Joomla site.

For example, a user of your site could use Wave to subscribe to changes in the site. The RSSy bot lets you specify an RSS feed and updates the Wave with blips for each new item in the feed.

So, you can create a new wave, add RSSybot, and specify the RSS from a Joomla site:

The resulting Wave looks like this:

This bot doesn't do the best job at handling the HTML in the feed, but you could improve that to insert iframes with the HTML, or convert the HTML into a Wave-compatible block of text with annotations for the styles.