JoomlArt's Blog

First month of the new year deserve much more than regular monthly releases, for starters we are releasing 3 cool FREE Joomla extensions which we are sure would be very useful for your websites. Yes, they are responsive too and works great with both Joomla 2.5 & Joomla 3.

These freebies are JA Image Hotspot module - Joomla extension for Image markup, JA Promo Bar module - cool flexible promotion bar for your site, and JA Google Charts module - Joomla extension for better visualization of your data using Google visualization API. Check out details below :

We got exciting news for everyone, our free Joomla translation component - JA Multilingual now also supports Google translate apart from Bing Translator. While both the services are great, Bing allows 2 million characters translations a month for free whereas Google translate is fully commercial. We have a little comparison chart down below highlighting the features of Bing translator and Google translate.

We have also updated JA Multilingual component to support auto translation of metatags and meta description, which should be helpful from the SEO point of view. The new version also fixes the bugs reported by users.

What’s up guys!

Since the release of Joomla 3.2 stable version earlier this month, we have been working extra hours to update our Joomla templates and extensions to be compatible with it.

Starting off the first batch of the Joomla 3.2 update series, we are eager to announce the first 10 Joomla extensions & 14 Responsive Joomla templates make it to the top list.

Building a Joomla 2.5 or Joomla 3 multilingual site can be tricky, we encountered difficulties while trying to setup multi-language demo site to demonstrate our RTL language layouts for our latest templates. We developed a internal tool to overcome the problems we faced and we thought why not add more options and release the extension as FREE for the benefit of the Joomla! community.

If you could recall our old JoomlArt site, we used to have a complicated demo system for everything but Joomla extensions. We never had a dedicated demo site for our Joomla extensions, and guys normally had to go through info page or templates demo in order to see how the extensions function.

We did take time to work on this and guess what: a whole new and complete site only for extensions demo is out. The Extensions Demo site serves as a showcase for 25 Joomla Extensions Club extensions for Joomla 2.5 & Joomla 3, including modules, plugins and components.

We’re kicking off this fall with the awesome responsive Joomla template: JA Muzic for both Joomla 3 & Joomla 2.5 version, a great pick for Entertainment, Music and Digital Media Joomla template.

Joomla extension search Module - JA K2 Filter at JoomlArt has been around since Joomla 1.5 and still going strong in Joomla 2.5 and Joomla 3 version. Apart from its search default functionality, JA K2 Filter has recently updated with 4 outstanding features: Extra field search mode, Dynamic Counter, Filter by rating, and Range slider. What are those features and how to use them?

Following up with our Batch 1 upgrade for Joomla 3.1, here is our batch 2 upgrade for our most 13 popular extensions. Please always take due back-up of your site before proceeding to any of the upgrade process.

Following up with our upgrade plan mentioned in our Joomla 3.1 stable release is now available and JoomlArt's upgrade plan announcement yesterday. We’re here with our first batch for Joomla 3.1 upgrade:

The Chaos

We have been developing extensions from the days of Mambo / Joomla 1.0, throughout these years, we do confront numerous issues arising from the way we code and structure them. The race is to have a working extension for the active joomla versions, but these upgrades for Joomla version fixes has also led to many issues :

1. Most of the extensions have been upgraded from Joomla 1.5 version till today. With all the upgrades they have been through, the extension structure is bit of a mess.
2. The extensions have been developed independently without any standardization; such as the UI, the common library sharing, leading to the inconsistent of:
• Setting forms: No standardization and unprofessional look
• No common library sharing: which request your website to keep loading pretty much the same library over and over again. This contributes "big time" in slowing down website performance. For instance, the jQuery library has been loaded multiple times with different versions for different type of extensions running on the same template.

How Can We Fix That?

We simply standardize and restructure them which do requires lot of work, but all worth it in the end.

We have recently upgraded 16 more templates and 8 extensions to be compatible with Joomla 3.0.3, adding to our current collection of 11+ Joomla 3.0 templates. Below we have the new upgrades available, please enjoy.

Roadmap for updating our Joomla 1.7 products to Joomla 2.5

Preliminary testing reports have revealed some minor issues with our templates and extensions when used with Joomla 2.5. The power of JAT3 will make upgrade tasks easier and faster. However, we still do not release anything without routine testing / checks. No hasty releases will be done just to be first to the post. Customer satisfaction is our ultimate goal.

Great news for Joomla users who make use of cloud computing to push user experience to the next level! JA Amazon S3 & Cloudfront CDN Component is now available for Joomla 1.6.

In this post we will introduce to you several CCKs you can consider to use to empower your Joomla site. First of all, using a content construction kit gives you more features, flexibility, control over any sort of content, structure and layout than the core of Joomla itself can do.

JobBoard Component - Version 1.4.6 has been released today, primarily a bug fix release with improvements and some new features.

• Detailed Changelog is HERE
• Compare files between the JobBoard Versions HERE
• Upgrade with JA Extensions Manager or simply overwrite the changed files

JobBoard Version 1.4.5 has been released. It is a bug and Security Fix version. Check the changelog HERE. Users are requested to upgrade their JobBoard to latest version.

JoomlArt is proud to introduce JA Extensions Manager, a brand new component for Joomla. The component aims to bring a new way to manage extensions: upgrade, rollback, remote install, internal repository and compare versions.
Our development team promised to transform old extension management into a new and modern one. It comes with new features to speed up and ease the processes.  Check the Video inside.

We are proud to introduce JA Comment Component, a brand new and powerful comment system for Joomla 1.5 and above. It provides a quick way to let your readers post comments on your content pages or provide valuable feedback. The component was developed to meet several needs such as easy administration, powerful front-end features, fast comment moderation and easy integration with other content components. It was designed to be easy for beginners and powerful enough for advanced users to administer and control. We can just keep on bragging about this unique commenting system, try it to believe it!

Dear members,
JA Lime is Feb 2010 Template and the demo can be viewed HERE and Downloads are available HERE. Interestingly, JA Lime Demo comes with preview of JA Comment. Feel free to test it out on the JA Lime Demo until the Beta Release is announced. To have a quick look at the features, you may visit the JA Comment Wiki.

Quick Links for JA Comments :

• Overview - Downloads - Release Notes
• Admin panel Tourguide

You may take part in active Discussion HERE.

JA Voice Enterprise component has been updated to V 1.2.5, this is bug fix and improvement release. Read the complete announcement here. If you are new to JA Voice, read more about it at JA Voice Homepage.