Today I've noticed that our frontpage was taking more than 10 seconds to load. Which is by any means unacceptable. I fired up Firebug and had a look at the network tab. Everything seemed normal, except for the response from the server. The server was taking 10s to generate the first response. After that in just few ms all Javascript and CSS resources were loaded. Due to the fact that we haven't changed anything on the site lately & we also didn't have any traffic spikes what I immediately did was submit a ticket with our hosting provider.

In my ticket I explained what the problem was: "The frontpage is loading really slow, it takes more than 10s for it to load. Sub-pages seems to behave way better at around 2s.... Any ideas what could be wrong?"

I've been asked recently by a customer how to add Google AdSense to the Hotspots Menu & on first look I thought that it should be as easy as pasting the adsense code in the module position that is available in the menu. However it turned out to me more complicated than that, so that's why I'm writing this blog post. 

This is the code that we have from Google AdSense:

We've been teasing you for some time now on Facebook with screenshot of the upcoming multi images upload feature. Now the teasing is over! Hotspots 5.1 is here and if you've ever wanted to add more than 1 image to a Hotspot, you'll love it!

Instead of going into the technical details, I'll spare you this and show you the screenshot instead. This is how the new picture form field looks like:

This blog post is a reply to this topic on Joomla's forum: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=642&t=815225 but when I tried to post it there I got a 403 error, that is why I thought that I'll share this information here.

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on the multiple upload functionality that is going to come with the next Hotspots version. I'm about to finish this off, but as usual there are some things that pop up and need rewriting. I've decided that instead of hardcoding the generated thumbnails, I'll add an option for the user where he can define his own thumbnail dimentions.

Today I've spent an hour trying to figure out how to use custom filtering on a JForm field. I knew that it was possible, but I just didn't know how. Searching on google also didn't help much. The question was asked a year ago on stackoverflow and nobody has answered it yet.

So, I decided that I'll have to look in the code and figure this on my own. Why would you want to do custom filtering? In my case users had to submit percentages in a field. The values were stored in the database as double, so I had to make sure that values submitted for example with comma, were properly saved in the database. What I've done in the past (and I'm ashamed to acknowledge this) is overriding the controller's save function, making the changes to the form data and passing the modified data to back to JForm. Well, it works, but in this project I wanted to save time & finally do it the correct way.

The German Joomla community is organising a Pizza, Bugs and Fun (PBF) event on the 14th of March 2015. Yves and I, we've been participating in online PBF events in the past and it has always been a great experience. Now, I'm sure that meeting in person with other Joomla fans would be even better. To find out if your local German Joomla user group is taking part in the event check this page: http://www.joomla.de/news/81-joomla-besser-machen-ein-mitmach-tag. As far the Joomla! Rhein Neckar User Group (in which we take part) is concerned we will be meeting in Walldorf, in the Altrottstraße 34a in the Deutschsprachigen SAP-Anwendergruppe e.V. building.

Do you need to be a developer to participate?- No! You don't even have to have experience with Joomla. We'll start by seting up everything necessary (xampp, joomla, git) and after that all you need to do is test bug fixes.

I had a customer who wanted to specify a different site language for their events page made with Matukio. His main language was German and he had a single page, which had to be in English. I've wasted more hours than I'm comfortable to admit on this issue and that is why I thought that I'll share the solution with you, in case you need it.

If we were dealing with a standard multilingual site, the solution to this issue would be pretty straight forward. Define a new content language, enable the language filter plugin, create a menu item for our page and set the language to English. If we go this way we run into the problem that once a user lands on the English version of the page, all links on the site will get /en appended to them. But we don't want this. We want that the links stay as they are.

I planned to write this post for quite some time now, but never actually came to writing it. I've got a lot of questions in the past related to our demo site and the menu structure. After I had a look at a customer's website over the weekend only to find around 30 menus with each 1-2 entries in them I decided that it's time to share what I know. And believe me the information that you are going to find is not a secret, but I find an astonishing number of people that don't know about this "trick".

So, If you look at our demo site you'll notice that on the top we have our main navigation and then on the right we have a menu that is related to current page/extension. Here is a screenshot.

Since the first version of Hotspots one of the most requested features has always been - nested categories! Literally most requested - I get a mail about it nearly every other week :) .

After deleting few thousand lines of code and making changes to most of Hotspots files I'm happy to announce that nested categories are now part of Hotspots.

As a small business owner my dream is to concentrate only on our products. Code, code, code! Forget about everything else there is to running a business. Unfortunately the biggest burden as usual are taxes. Just when you think that you finally have gotten the hang on it, things change :)

Last year the European Union had made some changes to the VAT laws which had to be implemented by the first of January 2015. As you can imagine I found out about this a week before January 2015... So I panicked. The rules concerned individuals from the EU. If you reside in the EU we now have to charge you the VAT of your own country. WTF? That are 28 different VAT rules! Fortunately I tried to listen to my own words: "Don't panic! Don't panic!" - something I say pretty often to you, when you have an urgent support request :)