According to some fatalists the end of the world is approaching. I don't subscribe to that view* and that is why I thought that it would be nice to reflect on the past year and have a look at what's still way in front of us.
Before I start talking about anything else I want to thank you for being our customer & for being so AWESOME! You are helping us grow not only as a company, but as human beings. Thank you for all the feedback, forum posts, tickets, emails, tweets, calls and whatever!
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:
We've just released "CMC - Mailchimp for Joomla" 1.2 . This is a maintenance release that fixes all reported bugs since version 1.1 and it also ads support for Joomla 3.0 . In matter of fact CMC - looks awesome with Joomla 3.0! Here are few screenshots:
Don't wait! Go to the download section and grab the new release now!
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).
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!
Back in July this year Yves and I, we lead our first "Joomla extension development masterclass" at dothewebinar.com. Since I'm not really a fan of theory I wanted to show our students how to create a real world joomla extension. Now the thing is - do you create somethnig useless (farts app anyone???) or do you create something simple & yet usefull? During the year I've spoken to Brian Teeman several times and he had this idea for notes extension. While I was thinking - what should we do for the webinar it came to me - write that notes extension! I can show the students how to create the backend of the extension, how to create the frontend, even write a module for the component! Show them how to create an installation package that installs the component + modules, how to handle ajax requests, how to escape data provided from the user, how to use phing, git... That is simple, usefull & I can very good demonstrate the power of the Joomla framework! This is how CNotes was born!
Unfortunatly 8h are not much. During the webinar we were able to show the good parts of the Joomla framework and we had a simple extension, but it was not something that I wanted to distribute (var_dumps everywhere, code that was only added to demonstrate something). So last week I took some time to finish that small extension.
In July we released the first version of our new(free as in a beer) extension CMC - Mailchimp for Joomla. Sofar we got awesome feedback and want to thank anyone who downloaded it and uses it. As it is normally the case - no software is perfect. Today we've released a small update that is making the extension hopefully a little more user friendly :)
One of the complaints that we had in the past was about the webhook key. It seemed that nobody was able to understand what to enter in that field. So in CMC 1.1 - you don't have to enter anything! You just need to copy the url and paste it in mailchimp. (in the background we generate a key and add it to your URL - yea!) This should bring you up to speed in no time!
We've just released Hotspots 3.1.1 . This is a maintenance release that fixes all the bugs reported since version 3.1. Here is the changelog:
~ 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# fixed - readmore in menu firing wrong click event# fixed - search results not showing custom markers~ search now has pagination and respects the list lenght limit set in the options# fixed - infoWindow closes when moving around. Now it only closes when one changes the category# fixed - js bug preventing the map in single view to show the location of the hotspot# fixed - wrong redirects when entering a hotspot# fixed - the geolocate button was not click-able in frontend submit form# fixed - js error when loading the map with custom tiles# fixed - wrong markers shown when a tab is closed# fixed - when copying a search link and opening it in another tab the map now loads properly+ updating the stats module to show number of tiles + option to delete the tiles# the hotspot name was shown in the div for the marker_address...~ removing \t \n \r from the ajax response - should reduce the file size a little# fixed - comma is missing between address and town (infowindow)# fixed -> wrong tiles generated when searching for something# updated the liveupdate library - this fixes a bug with wrong version number displayed (no version number displayed)~ moving to downloadid instead of username&password for live update- removed the information view as we use overview module in the dashboard for this# fixed - miltiple KMLs were not shown in the same category
I'm happy to announce that Hotspots 3.1 is available for download. This releases adds a custom tile layer feature that is going to be really useful to people who have a lot of markers.
Hotspots 3.0 was able to handle large volumes of marker data thanks to the server side boundary method. The server side boundary method is great at high zoom level, but when you have a lot of data it's a little confusing to the user where the markers are and where he has to zoom in to get more data.
