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.

We are very happy to announce that our events extension Matukio 3.0 is now available for download! Version 3 brings major changes to the backend (fully MVC and bootstraped now!), integrates different fees and location pages and a lot of other awesome new features!

To see Matukio live in action take a look at the demo page and at the new Product Tour at matukio.compojoom.com! Additionally we also have a "short" video showing the changes of Matukio 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy2ljavc3AY

Rewrite of the backend

We have put a lot of effort (30.000 lines of code changed) in completly rewriting the Matukio backend to the Joomla MVC patterns and the user interface to bootstrap. Matukio now integrates 100% into the Joomla 3 design, for Joomla 2.5 we have backported Bootstrap so that you have all these amazing features there too. The new backend brings a separate view for your bookings (you can now take a look of all bookings at once and not just at event specific ones), many new filters and search options and an optimized workflow saving you a lot of time. To see the backend live in action take a look at the Product Tour and at the video above.

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I'm happy to announce that Cmandrill 3.0 is now available for download.

Version 3 introduces a major change to the way we handle the Mandrill templates. In previous versions you had to specify the component, view and task that send the template. This was working most of the time, but it was not working when templates were sent out of plugins (because the view and component could be different each time). In this version CMandrill no longer relies on those, but it actually looks for the class & function name that send the mail. This way we can be pretty sure that the correct template will be selected all the time. If you are updating from version 2, you'll need to modify your templates! Check our docs for more info.

If you don't already use MailChimp for your newsletter campaigns - you should! (It's no secret that we love MailChimp here on compojoom.com & we use it ourselves!). With the release of version 1.4 of CMC (our MailChimp integration for Joomla) we've added some pretty cool features.

In previous versions users were only able to subscribe to your newsletter using the module. Which is perfectly ok, but what happens when you have a lot of people registering on your site, but they never bother to fill out your newsletter form? Well, now with CMC 1.4 you'll be able to ask your users to subscribe to your newsletter during the registration on your site! We've created 3 plugins - one for the default Joomla registration, one for Community Builder and one for Jomsocial! Enabling those is pretty easy! All plugins have the same options (which actually are the same as the ones you are using in the module)

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!

After the feature full 3.4 release last month, it was time to top that by releasing Hotspots 3.5 . This version should excite a lot of you who were waiting for "latest hotspots" module and the ability to disable certain categories for frontend marker submission. In addition to this we've added the long awaited AlphaUserPoints integration. If you have a community website you'll be happy to know that the name of the user who submitted a location can now be linked to his Jomsocial or Community Builder profile.

A lot of people also wanted to set the map center depending on the user's location. This is now also possible and you can see it in action on our demo page. The user centering is a complex beast. We first match the IP of the user and try to find out his position(which is not always correct) and we set the map to center there. After that if you decide to turn on HTML5 geolocation the user will be asked for his location. If he decides to share it, then we will - re-center the map to that location. You can learn more about that in our documentation.

Today I've released CTransifex 1.5. It fixes all reported problem since the last release (problems with the installation of the language packs) and also introduces a new language view, that will give your users more information about the status of the translation:

The "Contribute now" button will lead users directly to the language editor in transifex.

A less known feature of the Google Maps API is that it provides support for different kind of layers. With Hotspots 3.4 with just 1 click you can enable support for the Weather, Traffic, Transit, Bicycle & Panoramio layers (please note not all layers are available in all parts of the world).

If you wonder why layers are so cool, here are few examples:

Hotspots 3.3 is a maintenance release. We've fixed quite a few bugs since the last release :) But a thing that really excites me is the support for the Styled Maps feature in the Google Maps API.

Ever since I saw a demo of it I wanted to add it to Hotspots. Now it is here! You can check it in action over here. Now you can create a map that closely matches the style of your site. If you have a dark template you can generate a dark map with just a few clicks. Use the Google Maps API Styled Maps Wizard & then just copy and past the JSON string in the Hotspots configuration. That is all!

It's been nearly 2 years since we released the last CComment update. Unfortunately there is always a moment in the life of a software product when adding a new feature means breaking 10 others. The first version of CComment was developed in 2005 (originally !joomlacomment) following the best programming conventions back then. But as it happens -> what was really great 8 years ago is outdated & unmaintainable today. CComment was feature full, but extremely hard to support. That is why in the end of 2011 we've set on the task of rewriting it, but before we've started with any code we've laid out some of the most important areas that needed improvement: