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

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!

After more than 900h of work, we are proud to announce that Hotspots 3.0 is available for download. In this blogpost I'll try to outline the most notable changes.

The backend has a Control Center that gives you quick access to the last 5 published hotspots and to any backend view. In addition there is a feed module that will grab the latest blog post from compojoom.com related to hotspots. This way you can always be up to date with the development status or find out tips and tricks how to get the maximum out of it.

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:

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 subscribers

Let us check out what is new:

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.

We are excited to announce a great partnership with JoomlaPraise Template Club. They have been supplying the Joomla! community some of the hottest template around. Last year the site went dormant. Lack of updates and more. JP went through a few change of owners and finally found a new home with 'corePHP'. We all know the quality, amazing products and services 'corePHP' delivers. We will see many exciting things at JP now with new founders at the reign. They recently restructured and released an updated Joomla! 2.5 template with new coding structure. Eleglance 2.5 works amazingly with CompojoomComment and HotSpots right out of the box. Oh...and get this the template is responsive and they even have our components working so these products looks amazing on your mobile phone or tablet. How cool is that! Amazing work over at JoomlaPraise and we are very excited to be part of the new JP future templates.

Check out the demo:

Since now the first beta of Joomla 2.5 is published I thought that it would be good to make a short blog post to explain where we are and where we are going.

Currently all our extensions are working on joomla 1.5, 1.7 and 2.5, yes you read it right! Joomla 2.5!!! So, if you are running joomla 1.7 and you want to update to 2.5 (STABLE) - don't hesitate - everything should work as before! (btw - Joomla 1.7 reaches end of life in February 2012 and Joomla 1.5 in April 2012 - so prepare to update/migrate guys!)