Since the release of Matukio 4.2 we had many minor releases and three major ones, which brought some nice new advanced features and some cool additions. In this blog post we are going to give you an overview about the changes.

Let's start with the biggest addition Matukio now has three new cronjobs for recurring automatic tasks (cli/matukio.php):

Today we released Matukio 2.2.2 - Primary a big maintenance update, but because I was very busy when we released Matukio 2.2 some weeks ago, in this blog post I'm going to explain all changes the current version offers in comparison to the latest 2.1 version 2.1.10. In fact 2.2 brought so many changes that we thought about calling it 3.0, but we'll save it for the next for the next Joomla LTS Version (3.5), where we will also have a complete rewritten backend (100% Bootstrap, even in the "old" areas). To see Matukio 2.2 live in action take a look at the demo page, hundreds of screenshots (both backend or frontend) are waiting for you in here.The template systemOne of the most desired and biggest changes is the new Template System for E-Mails, Export lists (like signature, participants list and csv) and certificate templates. You now can easily customize these to your need with the Joomla editor, field data can be easily inserted by using MAT_BOOKING_FIELDNAME (for example MAT_BOOKING_CITY will be replaced through the users booking value in the field city) or MAT_EVENT_FIELD for the events details. Along side you could also support multi-language through language keys. The booking E-Mail and the Certificate can also be customized / overwritten in the event edit / create dialog.New eventlist templateFitting to the new modern event template which was introduced in 2.1, we now have also a new modern eventlist template. The new template is also completely table less and optimized for an optimal events experience. Fitting to the new modern layout (which you can customize through many paramenters in the backend) you can now have hot and top events (with different css classes and some more nice promotion visuals). The template is also optimized for webinars and events with a location (you can now view the location map directly from the eventlist by clicking on the icon) - if you are using organizer pages you can also access them directly though it.Payment PluginsIn 2.2 we moved to the Joomla payments API which offers a standardized way of implementing new payment methods. Currently Matukio supports the following payment methods: Cash, Banktransfer, PayPal (both normal PayPal and PayPal Pro), PayU, Pay by check, Pay by PO, Amazon, Authorize Net, CCAvenue and some more. You can customize, enable and disable plugins in the Joomla -> Extension Manager. If you disable all, the payment processing will be completely shut off. Optimized Booking formThe new booking form has been improved many ways, starting from a better and complete summary on page 3 (now including payment details), which now complies with the european / german laws and many other small additions and bugfixes making bookings much more user friendly.Organizer pagesYou can now have custom organizer pages presenting your organizer to your visitor. You can use any HTML-Code you want for that and the pages are deeply integrated into the whole event system.New modules2.2 also brings four new different modules to you (you can still use the old one):- Calendar module offers you a nice, AJAX driven view of the next events. - Upcoming events- Booking module- Upcoming events slideshow  Import events and bookings from SeminarYou can now easily import your old event data from Joomla 1.5 Seminar. All event details, all bookings and the categories are imported into your Joomla 2.5 / 3 page with one click. Various Bugfixes and smaller improvmentsBeside the explained changes / updates you can find many other updates and improvements in Matukio, like better support for access levels, improved webinar support, hundreds of new tooltips in the backend which explain all features and options and so much more. In conclusion we like to thank you the community for your continuous bug reporting, feature requests and ideas - without you Matukio wouldn't be what it is today! Thank you!

As some of you may know - I'm member of the JED team (http://extensions.joomla.org) since February this year. It is an interesting experience and a job that is extremely demanding... One needs to constantly approve/reject extensions and no matter how hard one works - there are always new extensions in the queue. Believe it or not one of the most common reasons to reject a listing is because it is missing an index.html file in a folder or "defined('_JEXEC') or die()" statement in the php files or a license tag.

Developers have been always talking and talking that those checks can be automated and when you submit an extension the JED should let you know if you don't pass a certain test/rule. On jandbeyond this year we were again talking about that and somebody suggested that we should create a component for this. And it struck me! All this time I thought that I needed access to the JED server to make changes to the software we run, but if I don't have this access - why not create an extension and make developers aware of it! If developers test their zip packages before they submit them to the JED, this could ensure that their submissions won't be rejected due to missing index.html files... This could save JED editors time and it could save developers time! And as we know time is money...