Joomla 3.0 was released few weeks ago and unfortunatly the extensions written for joomla 2.5 were not working out of the box on it. We took on the task of updating our extensions and making them compatible with it. Now the first extensions that we've "converted" is Hotspots. You can now run it on both Joomla 2.5 and 3.0 . Here is also the complete changelog:

+ Added support for Joomla 3.0~ setting sticky to 0 when importing from sobi - this way one can edit a hotspot without losing the coordinates# fixed - edit button in hotspots view was not working# fixed - infowindow is not centered on the screen when we finish the ajax request+ updating the CB plugin and adding it to the main package~ sobiPRO import - added support for the GeoMap field# fixed - import from sobiPRO was not working~ making the router function a little more clever. We try to match the hotspot category against the start category selected in the menu# fixed - map was not working on IE8# fixed - when editing a hotspot from the frontend the wrong category was selected# publish/unpublish hotspots redirects to the wrong view# zoom not working in single view~ don't rely on $ - avoids conflicts with incorrectly included jquery libraries

As usual you can get the latest Hotspots version in our download section!

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.

It has been a long time since the last Hotspots release. I haven't really anticipated this, but clustering and preparing the component to work with large databases proved to be a hard task. I'm happy to say that this 1st development release finally manages to overcome most of the problems related to large database sets. I've made several tests with 10 000 locations and 100 000 locations and things look really good. Your browser is not going to crash and your server is not going to tell you that it is out of memory either!

After I've experimented with several clustering algorithms, I've decided to use the server side boundary method. It is a really simple approach that works fine most of the time. When you open the map and it is centered over New York, USA - the component will make an Ajax request sending the boundaries of the map (the furthest northeast and southwest points) to the server and the server will search the database for locations in those boundaries. This is the first difference with Hotspots2. In Hotspots 2.0 the mysql query takes all hotspots in a specific category. Now the new query will return only the results in the viewable area. When the user moves around a new query is executed and we retrieve the results for the new area. But what happens when we have a lot of locations in a specific area? Well, the query will return the first 100 hotspots, but the user will be able to move to the next page which will show the next 100 hotspots etc. Now the list on the right is directly related to the hotspots in the viewable map area. Moving to the second page will change the hotspots on the map. Zooming in, will change the hotspots in the list, etc.