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!

We are very excited to announce that for the last month we've been working hard to bring the Mailchimp experience back to Joomla. Thanks to Mailchimp the new "CMC - Mailchimp® for Joomla!™ " extension is going to be absolutly free!

The current feature list of CMC includes:

Hello guys! We are presenting you today the new version of our well know Wordpress/Drupal migration extension CMigrator!

CMigrator 1.0 got an user friendly error display. Now it is really easy to figure out why the migration is not working!

CMigrator 0.5 fixes some scenarious where the migration was not working properly. This makes it more reliable than ever.

We've added support for comment migration from Wordpress to CompojoomComment!

The JEDchecker is getting better and better!

For this release I would like to thank to Tobias Kuhn, Peter van Westen, Alain Rivest and of course last but not least OpenTranslators :)

As some of you may know - I'm member of the JED team (http://extensions.joomla.org) since February this year. It is an interesting experience and a job that is extremely demanding... One needs to constantly approve/reject extensions and no matter how hard one works - there are always new extensions in the queue. Believe it or not one of the most common reasons to reject a listing is because it is missing an index.html file in a folder or "defined('_JEXEC') or die()" statement in the php files or a license tag.

Developers have been always talking and talking that those checks can be automated and when you submit an extension the JED should let you know if you don't pass a certain test/rule. On jandbeyond this year we were again talking about that and somebody suggested that we should create a component for this. And it struck me! All this time I thought that I needed access to the JED server to make changes to the software we run, but if I don't have this access - why not create an extension and make developers aware of it! If developers test their zip packages before they submit them to the JED, this could ensure that their submissions won't be rejected due to missing index.html files... This could save JED editors time and it could save developers time! And as we know time is money...

We are happy to inform you that version 0.4 of CMigrator was just released. Migrating from Wordpress or Drupal to Joomla was never easier!

So, what is new?

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:

As Douglas Crockford puts it: “Javascript is the world’s most misunderstood language” . I think that in the Joomla universe this statement is 200% accurate. Most of the extension developers out there are good with PHP, but when it comes to javascript one wants to just find that snippet online, copy & paste it and forget about it - code quality here is not that important! And I say doh! It is important!

Joomla extensions are installed on 1000s of websites. But the thing is – users don’t install just 1 extension. They install a lot of them! Modules, plugins, and components – everything is thrown into the mix. And out of one small JS mess we get one big mess! Javascript is mixed with html, global variables are all over the place, there is no trace of modularity, no trace of good design patterns and it is just painful to watch. If you are lucky enough – your component will work and you won’t have to do any support, but as it happens most of the time – your extensions are not going to work because of other peoples copy and pasting!

Few days ago I decided to help Yves with a datetime bug in Matukio (dating back to its "Seminar" roots). Everything seemed to be straight forward. I've worked with JDate in the past and had some experience with timezones. So I took the challenge thinking that I'll spend 2h and everything would be fine. Well, as it often happens a 2h job turned to be a one and a half day job... (this could make a very good blog post about estimates, but I'll do that another time...)

Let us examine the problem at hand. User A fills out a form, which has a field that stores a date. The best thing to do when you store the date in the db is to convert it to UTC. Why to UTC? Well this way you can have always a starting point and when you present the output to the user you can add different timezones depending on the users position. The trick here is to convert the date back to UTC. Fortunately JDate can help us with that. If you look at the JDate class in libraries/joomla/utilities/date.php you will see that the constructor actually expects 2 parameters -> the date and the timezone. So when you save a date you would generally want to do something like this: