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:

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.

After a lot of months of work, Hotspots 4 has been finally released. I have blogged in the past about the changes that are comming with this release (if you want to understand the reasoning behind the new frontend UI, make sure to read that post)  and since I don't like to repeat myself, this time we'll do something different! We are going to make an image heavy post :)

What's new in hotspots? Here are few of the most important changes.

Latetly a lot of people asked me "What's going on with Hotspots 4? When is it going to be released?" As usual I won't commit to a deadline - it's going to be released when it is ready :).

If you want to speed up that process - you can test the alpha version that I released in the dev. downloads section. Currently this alpha is missing some of the features that we already have in version 3 such as KML support, full screen view, print & rss. But the rest of the functionality is there! There are a few glitches, but as a whole it looks good! I've made a small video demo to show you how the new Hotspots user interface will look and behave.

The hardest part when developing software is being aware of the real world. Way too often we live in a bubble that clouds our judgement. Looking at the incomming support tickets we tend to think that our software is full of bugs. Looking at the reviews we start to think that it is the best thing in the world. The truth is actually somewhere in the middle. Lately I realised again that Hotspots is a great piece of software. And as with any software - there are things that work great and there are things that need to be improved.

Due to unpredicted circumstances I wasn't able to finish Hotspots 4 as planned for the begining of March. So, to spare you some waiting I decided to finish off what I already had and to release 3.6. I think that this is one of our finest releases so far.

After the feature full 3.4 release last month, it was time to top that by releasing Hotspots 3.5 . This version should excite a lot of you who were waiting for "latest hotspots" module and the ability to disable certain categories for frontend marker submission. In addition to this we've added the long awaited AlphaUserPoints integration. If you have a community website you'll be happy to know that the name of the user who submitted a location can now be linked to his Jomsocial or Community Builder profile.

A lot of people also wanted to set the map center depending on the user's location. This is now also possible and you can see it in action on our demo page. The user centering is a complex beast. We first match the IP of the user and try to find out his position(which is not always correct) and we set the map to center there. After that if you decide to turn on HTML5 geolocation the user will be asked for his location. If he decides to share it, then we will - re-center the map to that location. You can learn more about that in our documentation.

Hotspots 3.3 is a maintenance release. We've fixed quite a few bugs since the last release :) But a thing that really excites me is the support for the Styled Maps feature in the Google Maps API.

Ever since I saw a demo of it I wanted to add it to Hotspots. Now it is here! You can check it in action over here. Now you can create a map that closely matches the style of your site. If you have a dark template you can generate a dark map with just a few clicks. Use the Google Maps API Styled Maps Wizard & then just copy and past the JSON string in the Hotspots configuration. That is all!

I'm happy to announce that Hotspots 3.2.2 has just been released. This is a cumulative stability update fixing both bugs on joomla 3.0 and on joomla 2.5

Here is the changelog:

+ adding a copy link button
~ category-shadow is now required in the category settings
+ adding metadata information on map view# map was not refreshing the locations properly when the search tab was selected# fixed layout issues on joomla 3.0
# date was not respecting the format setting on the maps view# fixed a bug with the jomsocial plugin
# some hotspots were not shown on the map and in the menu (bug introduced with the new sorting)
# the check all button in backend was not functioning properly on j3.0# search by street/country/town was not working - thanks to Grazing Cat .Inc for providing us with a fix
# sorting hotspots by name ASC in the menu
# single hotspots was not rendered when ccomment was selected in the options, but it was not actually installed on the user's site
# sql error when hotspots order is set to created time~ the install script not allows the installation only on joomla >= 2.5.6
# userhotspots was not working on joomla 3.0
# the map was missing from "submit-hotspots" view in the frontend on joomla3# readmore was showing in the menu even though "Marker detailpage" was set to no
~ making the links to k2 a little better
~ running the intro text through the code of the SEF plugin
# the search - hotspots plugin was not properly working on joomla 2.5 and 3.0

Yesterday I uploaded Hotspots RC1 to the download section (dev area). This is supposed to be the last version before a stable release. Of course if any major problems are found I reserve myself the right to release RC2 :)

This version fixes all reported problems since beta2 + ads a new content plugin that you can use to show a specific hotspot in your articles.

I've just published Hotspots 3 beta2 to our development section. This release includes all bug fixes and speed improvements since beta1.

For more information on what is new in version 3 please refer to the following blog posts: