JEDchecker 1.0 released - let us save some time!

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...

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We are getting there! - Hotspots 3 beta2 released!

I've just published Hotspots 3 beta2 to our development section. This release includes all bug fixes and speed improvements since beta1.

For more information on what is new in version 3 please refer to the following blog posts:

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Current development status of Matukio - Event Manager

Since the first release of Matukio we have been working hard on a new stable version with awesome new features and many bugfixes. We have released some alpha versions, which showed some of the new features and bugfixes. Yesterday we then released the final development version, which is feature complete. This means we are only going to fix release critical bugs and other problems found in it and not going to add new features. We changed and added around 20.000 lines of code, so everyone is invited to help searching for bugs and problems.  

So in this blog post i want you to show some of changes and optimizations we've made. Let's start with the frontend, where some of the most noticeable changes took place:

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CMigrator 0.4 - migration just got easier!

CMigrator 0.4 - migration just got easier!

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?

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Hotspots 3 beta1 released

Hotspots 3 beta1 released

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:

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Working with Javascript in Joomla - Part 1

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!

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How to use JDate

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:

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Some awesome CSS 3 tips and tricks for your site - Part 1

With CSS 3 you can easily create some awesome effects, like nice borders, opacity-effects, roundings or beautiful text effects. How you could easily use it to improve your site i want to show in this tutorial series. In the first two tutorials we start with some basics and then move on to some more sophisticated things.

Remember CSS3 is not supported in all browsers, above all on old Internet Explorer Versions (prior IE 9) most effects will not work, but for the good part most modern mobile browser nd Chrome Safari (both Webkit) and Mozilla offer full support for CSS 3. A very nice overview table about CSS Browser support, you can find at http://www.normansblog.de/demos/browser-support-checklist-css3/.

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CMigrator version 0.3 - The life saver!

CMigrator version 0.3 - The life saver!

As you may already heard, CMigrator is a Joomla component for article, categories and tags migration from Wordpress or Drupal. Well, in this new version we added users migration as well to the list of features!

However, user migration is not the only new feature. Let us look into details:

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Mandrill for Joomla! Say hello to transactional emails!

In the beginning of the month Mailchimp unveiled a new service called Mandrill. Mandrill is a service that allows you to send transactional emails.

The core features of it can be summarized in the following lines:

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