I thought about writing a long blog post about software development. How it is much more than just coding, but I think that this is just going to annoy you. So instead of just talking let us look at Hotspots 2.0 and why it is much better than anything else on the Joomla market.
At the top left you have your categories.
At the top right we have some tools such as:
Emailing a map is really easy – just click the mail button a facebook like popup will show on the page, fill it up and click send. (if you are logged as a user on the website then the fields "your e-mail" and "Sender" will be automatically populated.
Once you click on a category the view changes slightly. The menu on the right will slide in and you will get a list with all the hotspots in this category. You can click on the title of the hotspot and it will center the map on this marker and will open its info window. Once you have opened that info window you are presented with options such as directions | zoom | readmore. If you click the directions button you can easily find your direction to this place:
A much requested feature was a full screen view. If you click the resize button, the map will take all the available browser space:
The add Hotspot view was redesigned and now includes geolocation. Moving the marker on the map will update the address fields automatically (if we can find an address for that location of course) and also typing an address will move the marker automatically to the location (if we can find it).
The add hotspot view can now be protected with recaptcha (http://recaptcha.net)
In the backend we've made small improvements that are actually going to save you a lot of time.
On the all hotspots tab now you are able to sort by date. This allows you to easily see the latest hotspots and decide if you want to delete them or keep them.
Another awesome thing is that you most probably won't have to search for categories icons. Now you have more than 500 icons to choose from thanks to Nicolas Mollet from http://mapicons.nicolasmollet.com/
Another much requested feature was live update. Thanks to Nicholas Dionysopoulos we now have this as well :)
Hotspots is now compatible with Joomla 1.5, Joomla 1.6 and Joomla 1.7 beta1.
Note to Joomla 1.5 users – you will need to turn the mootools upgrade plugin on, otherwise hotspots is not going to work!Hotspots 2.0 relies heavily on mootools 1.2 or higher. As a matter of facts 37% of all the code in hotspots is javascript. 44% is php and the rest is HTML & CSS. Hotspots 2.0 integrates google maps API3, which has some awesome features such as street view and a lot of performance improvements.
