Since I started compojoom in 2008 there have been a lot of users who have asked me if we have an affiliate program. The answer always has been, no we don't. Lately the same question has started to pop-up nearly every week, so I decided that it was time to finally do that. I was postponing it long enough and at the end there was nothing wrong with happy customers promoting good Joomla extensions. So here it is! Say hello to partners.compojoom.com

By now you are most probably thinking - ah, not another affiliate program. Well, there is one important detail. Unlike most other affiliate programs where you get paid once for a sale, with us you'll get a commission every time a referred customer purchases any subscription from us for life! Yes, that's correct! Each time a referred customer purchases something from us you get a commission!

If you've recently updated to Joomla 3.4 you might have noticed this message:

A change to the default robots.txt files was made in Joomla! 3.3 to allow Google to access templates and media files by default to improve SEO. This change is not applied automatically on upgrades and users are recommended to review the changes in the robots.txt.dist file and implement these change in their own robots.txt file.

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:

This blog post is a reply to this topic on Joomla's forum: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=642&t=815225 but when I tried to post it there I got a 403 error, that is why I thought that I'll share this information here.

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on the multiple upload functionality that is going to come with the next Hotspots version. I'm about to finish this off, but as usual there are some things that pop up and need rewriting. I've decided that instead of hardcoding the generated thumbnails, I'll add an option for the user where he can define his own thumbnail dimentions.

Today I've spent an hour trying to figure out how to use custom filtering on a JForm field. I knew that it was possible, but I just didn't know how. Searching on google also didn't help much. The question was asked a year ago on stackoverflow and nobody has answered it yet.

So, I decided that I'll have to look in the code and figure this on my own. Why would you want to do custom filtering? In my case users had to submit percentages in a field. The values were stored in the database as double, so I had to make sure that values submitted for example with comma, were properly saved in the database. What I've done in the past (and I'm ashamed to acknowledge this) is overriding the controller's save function, making the changes to the form data and passing the modified data to back to JForm. Well, it works, but in this project I wanted to save time & finally do it the correct way.

The German Joomla community is organising a Pizza, Bugs and Fun (PBF) event on the 14th of March 2015. Yves and I, we've been participating in online PBF events in the past and it has always been a great experience. Now, I'm sure that meeting in person with other Joomla fans would be even better. To find out if your local German Joomla user group is taking part in the event check this page: http://www.joomla.de/news/81-joomla-besser-machen-ein-mitmach-tag. As far the Joomla! Rhein Neckar User Group (in which we take part) is concerned we will be meeting in Walldorf, in the Altrottstraße 34a in the Deutschsprachigen SAP-Anwendergruppe e.V. building.

Do you need to be a developer to participate?- No! You don't even have to have experience with Joomla. We'll start by seting up everything necessary (xampp, joomla, git) and after that all you need to do is test bug fixes.

I planned to write this post for quite some time now, but never actually came to writing it. I've got a lot of questions in the past related to our demo site and the menu structure. After I had a look at a customer's website over the weekend only to find around 30 menus with each 1-2 entries in them I decided that it's time to share what I know. And believe me the information that you are going to find is not a secret, but I find an astonishing number of people that don't know about this "trick".

So, If you look at our demo site you'll notice that on the top we have our main navigation and then on the right we have a menu that is related to current page/extension. Here is a screenshot.

Few days ago the Joomla! project released Joomla! 2.5.28 which is effectively going to be the latest 2.5.x release until the declared End of Life (EOL) for Joomla! 2.5 on the 31 December 2014.

What does this mean for your Joomla! 2.5 website?

Few days ago I decided to look into an issue that was reported on our forum. Basically the form validation in CMC was not working on Safari. The whole thing was very strange because we are using the Joomla! js classes to validate the form before submitting, so there was no reason why all this would not work. As I looked into the code I discovered things that I never knew & thought that it is a good idea to share them with other developers.

Since the Joomla! 1.5 days developers were able to use JHtml::_('behavior.formvalidation'); if they want to validate their forms with javascript before submitting. On Joomla 3.3 the formvalidation function looks like this.

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.