If you feel adventurous today, then head up to our dev download section and try out the latest Hotspots release git5e804a7. Behind that strange number is actually our first beta release!
Downloads are only available to subscribersLet us check out what is new:
Now you can select exactly which categories to be loaded when the user first opens the map. You even have the option to not select a category. This will just load the map -> with the menu centered on the directions tab. Your users could just start a search from there or select the category they want to look into.
When you first visit the backend of the component you will be greeted by a new dashboard:
You can easily see the last 25 hotspots added to your directory and navigate to them to either approve or correct something in them.
The hotspots edit screen in the backend has changed also and it now looks a lot like the standard joomla Article edit:
Markers can now have custom icons and can be linked to articles, K2 or sobiPro items (this is now handled by plugins - so virtually with few lines of code we can have an option to link to any component we want)
We have now got KML support:
Our import function supports SOBIPRO now:
Currently our front-end looks nearly the same as in version 2, but that doesn't mean that it has not changed. In matter of fact - all the Javascript was refactored. I'll explain in a future blog post why the new JS approach we have is better. For now just keep in mind that if you have made modifications to the js in version 2 - they most probably won't work. (Feel free to ask in the forum for assistance!)
Our front-end is now able to show a lot of hotspots! This is due to the fact that we no longer load all the hotspots in a given category as we did in version 2, but we now load the hotspots in the visible area of the user. We also limit the displayed hotspots to 100. The user can of course move to the second page etc to see the next hotspots.
I've tested the map with 10 000 hotspots in 1 category and it was loading pretty fast (try that with version 2 and your server will beg you not to repeat that :)). There are of course a lot of optimizations that we can do to make things even faster and smoother. That's what we are going to work on for beta2.
If you want to help - download this version, install it, test it and report any problems back to us! Word of caution here:
Don't install on production sites! This version is not yet ready for this!
If you are a translator - please check out the transifex page. We've got a lot of new language files that need translations (if you are interested in becoming a translator then please check this blog post)
