Today we present you another new Joomla 2.5 extension - Tiles. Tiles is a new way to present your content. You can use Tiles to show photos, present products or display news in an modern and unique way. Take a look at the Tiles - Detail page for an overview. You can see it live at the demo site or at the Compojoom Startsite.Tiles comes with three different Templates (simple, modern and compojoom) and many different scrolling effects, like Transitions or Scroll on Mouseover. You can style every tile to your needs, from backgrounds (image, color, gradients etc.), over Linktypes (like buttons or just one link over the whole tile) till effect-overlays.Tiles has an great, 100% Ajax driven, backend editor, which enables you to easily create and manage your Tile-Galleries in no time.  

 

We're really excited to present our newest Joomla 2.5 Extension - Matukio. Matukio is a very advanced Events Manager based on the well known extension com_seminar by Dirk Vollmar. We are putting much effort into transforming Matukio into an modern MVC Extension - in the last couple of month we ported and polished it for Joomla 2.5, added new features and fixed a bunch of bugs. Take a look at the Matukio - Detail page for an overview.We choose Seminar, because of its functionality, it's features and it's great usability. Sadly it seems that Dirk doesn't have the time to further develop the extension for newer versions of Joomla. In the next couple of weeks and month we will continue our complete rewrite of Seminar, introduce new amazing features and fix existing limitations and bugs. Matukio is still beta, so don't get mad at us when some things are not working the way you think they should - we promiss to fix them in almost no time and offer you Matukio for only 25 Euro (33 Dollar). Later it will be 39 or 49 Euro's, so you don't only support our work, but also save a lot of money when you buy Matukio right now!Here is a small list of features planned in the next couple of months:

- Google calendar integration- PayPal / Payment integration and Management- Webinar management (a bit later)- Search engine optimized URLs- working hand in hand with our products Hotspots and Comment- Calendar and Matukio content plugins- Mobile version for smartphones with html5 and css3- Much more flexibility and possibilities to present your events!- New amazing template system- Auto-generated tickets (with your design and barcode) as pdf, image etc.

I'm really excited to announce that today we finalized the new CMigrator 0.2 release. To get you excited as well I'll jump directly to the new features:

Drupal migrationMigration to K2

Yes, believe it! You can migrate your Drupal categories and articles in no time! If you migrate your content to K2, then you can even import your tags! (the wordpress to K2 migrator also support tag migration)

I've received a mail from Rapleaf few weeks ago with the following content:

Early in 2011, we decided to offer age and gender data, FOR FREE. You said to yourself, ‘these Rapleaf guys, they are loco, but hey, sign me up!’14 months, 30 billion free data points, and 15 billion personalized interactions later… The time has come to say farewell to free data. Thus, we are no longer offering free data as of 3/31/2012.The good news: please continue to enjoy data on the house, for the next 1+ month. New price: $0.005 per data point, per match. To ballpark cost, that's about $600 for age and gender on 100,000 email addresses. Not too bad, right?! The scoop: the plan was to offer these data points for free, on a limited basis, for a 3-month period. We kept pushing the free trial end date back, and back, and back… Call us too nice. It's been a great ride, and we had a terrific time working with all of you. Here's to more good times in the future.Currently our extension queries only the free data provided by Rapleaf and since there won't be anymore free data

Because of those changes I've decided to discontinue the development of the extension as of 31 of March. If we have enough inquiries to support the paid Rapleaf API, then we might change our mind.

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:

Love is in the air this time of the year no matter where you are in the world. We have gathered some of the most exciting Valentine's Day savings from the hottest Joomla companies around! And we made it easy for you. One Coupon code for all companies heartu20 and save 20%. Check out the savings below:

You really like the update functionality in the joomla 2.5 installer? We do too, but we got kinda bored. Each time we wanted to check if there are any new extensions updates we had to login into our website, go to the extension manager -> click update -> click find updates -> wait 5sec -> if there is nothing - well done dear, but you'll have to come again tomorrow...

O. Schwab got really bored by this routine and spoke with me about that 3 days ago. Then we thought - wouldn't it be great if there was a joomla plugin that could check for updates for us and send us a mail if there are! Well, there is one now!

After the initial setup problems we finally made it to transifex! All our extensions translations are now hosted there and all our current translators are advised to use the transifex platform to make the translations from now on.

For those of you who don't understand why the title of the blog is "Translate our components with opentranslators" and now suddenly in the first paragraph of it I start to talk again about transifex here is the short explanation

After 3 days of fight with Transifex my ordeal seems to be over! First a big thank you to Ratnadeep Debnath from transifex for working with me and fixing those bugs... And a big thank you for Peter van Westen for helping with my baby steps.

This tutorial is for Joomla developers that are considering the switch to transifex to manage their extension translations. Read on and I think that you will be up and running in no time.