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 had a customer who wanted to specify a different site language for their events page made with Matukio. His main language was German and he had a single page, which had to be in English. I've wasted more hours than I'm comfortable to admit on this issue and that is why I thought that I'll share the solution with you, in case you need it.

If we were dealing with a standard multilingual site, the solution to this issue would be pretty straight forward. Define a new content language, enable the language filter plugin, create a menu item for our page and set the language to English. If we go this way we run into the problem that once a user lands on the English version of the page, all links on the site will get /en appended to them. But we don't want this. We want that the links stay as they are.

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.

Since the first version of Hotspots one of the most requested features has always been - nested categories! Literally most requested - I get a mail about it nearly every other week :) .

After deleting few thousand lines of code and making changes to most of Hotspots files I'm happy to announce that nested categories are now part of Hotspots.

As a small business owner my dream is to concentrate only on our products. Code, code, code! Forget about everything else there is to running a business. Unfortunately the biggest burden as usual are taxes. Just when you think that you finally have gotten the hang on it, things change :)

Last year the European Union had made some changes to the VAT laws which had to be implemented by the first of January 2015. As you can imagine I found out about this a week before January 2015... So I panicked. The rules concerned individuals from the EU. If you reside in the EU we now have to charge you the VAT of your own country. WTF? That are 28 different VAT rules! Fortunately I tried to listen to my own words: "Don't panic! Don't panic!" - something I say pretty often to you, when you have an urgent support request :)

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?

A bit earlier then planned Matukio 5 is now available for download! Bringing tons of changes and new features to our Joomla events extension. If you are in a hurry and just want to take a look at the new responsive bootstrap 3 frontend visit our demo page!

New responsive frontend 

Matukio 5 brings a completely rewritten and improved frontend based on the bootstrap 3 framework. The new design is 100 % responsive and looks great on every device, from smartphones, over tables to large desktops. The frontend is now also completely jQuery based and does no longer need Mootools. And we did not only rewrite the public views, but also the frontend organizer area, so you have a continuous look & feel throughout the whole extension. But it is not only a design update, there are also a lot of new features in the different views!

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.

After a lot of months of work, Hotspots 4 has been finally released. I have blogged in the past about the changes that are comming with this release (if you want to understand the reasoning behind the new frontend UI, make sure to read that post)  and since I don't like to repeat myself, this time we'll do something different! We are going to make an image heavy post :)

What's new in hotspots? Here are few of the most important changes.