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.

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!

If you’ve been following the news in the Joomla world for the last couple of months you might be already aware of the Joomla Humble Bundle. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then read this blog post from Joomlart:http://www.joomlart.com/blog/news-updates/joomla-humble-bundle-join-hands-to-raise-1m-funds-for-joomlaorg-purchase-for-a-good-cause

Basically the Joomla Humble Bundle is an initiative to raise one Million US-Dollar for the Joomla project. Currently we are far away from this goal, but it is better to make a small step, than to do nothing right? And the best part is that in the last 3 months we were able to get awesome products at an awesome price!

A year ago I was helping a friend to make his homepage with Joomla. We needed a facebook fan page module. Actually we didn't needed it, but I was too lazy to add the facebook fan page code myself as I had to edit the template (to do it the HTML5 way...). So instead of doing it myself - I went on a hunt for a good Facebook page module. After a short look at the JED I found my module - it had the best reviews... I tested it - it worked! Hurray!

Unfortunately the other day the facebook fan box was not displayed by the module anymore. So today I decided to have a look at the actual HTML code that was generated & I was shocked to discover a hidden link. The link was pointing to a shop for flowers, so at least it is not a malware site... I immediately thought that the site was hacked and I went to look at the PHP code of the module. It turns out the website was not hacked & the link is generated by the module code. So I downloaded the last version of the module and had a look at the code again - well, this time there was again a hidden link, but it was pointing to another site. (you know what that means right?)

Today I've been working on making Hotspots multilingual ready. Since joomla 1.6 creating multilingual websites started to look like a piece of cake. There are several tutorials that explain how website administrators could do that: http://magazine.joomla.org/issues/issue-nov-2011/item/593-Build-a-Multilingual-Site-in-Joomla-1-7

And there is also a very good webinar that CloudAccess organised and recorded:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnhVVtyejPg

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

The JEDchecker is now compatible with joomla 3.0 and I've added 1 new check to it. The xmlinfo check will display information about the extension that we are checking. What we currently output is the extension name, version and creation date. The extension name information should help you to fill out the "filename and install as" fields in the JED submission form.

The new download can be found here & is also available through the joomla update manager.

We've just released a new version of the CTransifex extension. (you can download it here)

In this version we now support the generation of language packs for esperanto. We've also updated the default lang map with mappings for sr@latin, tl_PH. We've also removed mappings for few languages that should not be used such as ar (one should use the ar_AA language team). Because our default mappings had this ar: ar-AA, ar_AA: ar-AA we were generating the same language pack twice. You will need to manually update the options to fix this -> first open the component options and clear all the content from the maping field -> click save. Once it refreshes you'll see that the options have been populated with new content -> click save again. Please also make sure that your tx config doesn't have the same mapping. Generally the rule is -> 1 mapping per unique language.

Hey guys! I'm really happy to let you know that we've just released CMigrator 2.0 . Along with the few bugfixes, CMigrator can now be installed and used on Joomla 3.0 & you can now even import your drupal6 website!

Daniel got so excited about this new release that he even made a short video demonstrating how to use CMigrator:

Somewhere back in 2005 the first website that I've ever build with Joomla had to be in Bulgarian. Back then Joomla was in version 1.0 and more or less websites that needed a language other than English were really hard to do. I remember downloading a hacked version that made joomla utf8 aware, so that one could properly encode Cyrillic in the DB... It was a real pain in....

Then few years later Joomla 1.5 came out and a lot of the problems that non-english speakers had when making websites were gone. Joomla was using utf8, it was possible for each extension to distribute an .ini file with the strings that needed translations (no more php files for that).