BestofJoomla::Best of Resources

Matukio - Advanced events manager for Joomla

Sat, 12 May 2012 10:17:28 +0100

We're really excited to present our newest Joomla 2.5 Extension - Matukio. Matukio is a very advanced Events Manger based on the well known extension com_seminar by Dirk Vollmar. We are putting much effort into transforming Matukio into an modern MVC Extension - in the last couple of month we ported and polished it for Joomla 2.5, added new features and fixed a bunch of bugs. Take a look at the Matukio - Detail page for an overview. We choose Seminar, because of its functionality, it's features and it's great usability. Sadly it seems that Dirk doesn't have the time to further develop the extension for newer versions of Joomla. In the next couple of weeks and month we will continue our complete rewrite of Seminar, introduce new amazing features and fix existing limitations and bugs. Matukio is still beta, so don't get mad at us when some things are not working the way you think they should - we promiss to fix them in almost no time and offer you Matukio for only 25 Euro (33 Dollar). Later it will be 39 or 49 Euro's, so you don't only support our work, but also save a lot of money when you buy Matukio right now! Here is a small list of features planned in the next couple of months: - Google calendar integration - PayPal / Payment integration and Management - Webinar management (a bit later) - Search engine optimized URLs - working hand in hand with our products Hotspots and Comment - Calendar and Matukio content plugins - Mobile version for smartphones with html5 and css3 - Much more flexibility and possibilities to present your events! - New amazing template system - Auto-generated tickets (with your design and barcode) as pdf, image etc. - Custom registration and booking forms! - Better Communication management, support for newsletter systems (like acymailing) - Organizer pages (Presentation, photos and more) - Export event-lists in more formats then csv - Optimized presentation of events (full ajax driven and with stunning effects design) - Recurring events! - Multi picture / slideshow support - Social media integration (Facebook, Twitter, Share +1, Google plus etc.) - Real calendar overview not just list views - View by category, see by Year, by Month, see Today! - List of Locations - Top- and hot- events - Event colors and Stylesets - and so much more If you have any ideas or wishes for Matukio, post them and we'll see if we can integrate them. P.S. In case you wonder what Matukio means - it comes from the swahili language and means??? Yep, events!!! :)

How to use JDate

Sat, 12 May 2012 10:16:39 +0100

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: $date = new JDate($myDate, $myTimezone); Now the question is -> how do you properly calculate a timezone? Well, joomla helps us with that as well. You could write a small utility function that would look like this: /** * Returns the userTime zone if the user has set one, or the global config one * @return mixed */ public static function getTimeZone() { $userTz = JFactory::getUser()->getParam('timezone'); $timeZone = JFactory::getConfig()->getValue('offset'); if($userTz) { $timeZone = $userTz; } return new DateTimeZone($timeZone); } In the first line we try to get the user timezone, in the second we get the global config timezone. If the user has set a timezone in his configuration, then we pass the value of it to the DateTimeZone object. If the user on the other hand has not set a timezone, then we use the global one. Now that we have the correct time zone we can format the date to the MySQL format and store it in the database. $myTimezone = myHelperClass:getTimezone(); $date = new JDate($myDate, $myTimezone)->format('Y-m-d H:i:s', false, false); The first parameter to the format function is 'Y-m-d H:i:s' - this is the format we want our date to be saved in the db. The second parameter tells the function that we want to have the GMT/UTC time and the third parameter tells the format function that we don't want to translate the date. Now you can save a correct UTC date in your database. Once you have that you will obviously want to show the date to the user again. This is also fairly straight forward provided you don't make the same mistake as I did. When I was trying to show the date I stored in the DB I was thinking - hm, the second parameter that I pass to JDate is the timezone, so obviously I need to pass the timezone I want my date to be presented in. So I used my utility function and passed the timezone as a second parameter. After that I just used the format function to output the date, but to my astonishment instead of showing the correct date and time I expected my date was actually 2h off. I wanted to have a date in the Berlin timezone, which is +1 (and +1 for DST), but I somehow ended with a date that was -2... I couldn't understand what was going on. So eventually I ended up purchasing a book that deals with the Date and Time subject in depth: Date and Time programming - a very good book on the subject and a good read for every PHP developer. After few hours reading I learned a lot of things that I didn't know , but unfortunately I still couldn't understand why my date was -2h off... Eventually it struck me like a lightning! The second parameter was there to help JDate convert the date to UTC, I was not supposed to pass a timezone parameter if my date was in the UTC timezone. Here is what I had to do: $date = new JDate($myDate); $date->setTimezone($myTimezone); echo $date->format(...); Easy isn't it? There are also few things that could be useful to know: JHtml::_('date', $myDate) will output an UTC date in the user's timezone automatically -> so there is not need to calculate the timezone yourself. JHtml::_('calender', myDate ...) won't convert the date to the user's timezone so you have to make sure that you provide the date with the correct timezone If you use JForm calender time you can provide a filter: SERVER_UTC or USER_UTC that will handle the timezone calculations for you. I hope that this post will save you some time and that you learned something :) If you have any questions or remarks use the comment section below!

Tiles - the new awesome way to present your content!

Sat, 12 May 2012 10:15:18 +0100

Today we present you another new Joomla 2.5 extension - Tiles. Tiles is a new way to present your content. You can use Tiles to show photos, present products or display news in an modern and unique way. Take a look at the Tiles - Detail page for an overview. You can see it live at the demo site or at the Compojoom Startsite. Tiles comes with three different Templates (simple, modern and compojoom) and many different scrolling effects, like Transitions or Scroll on Mouseover. You can style every tile to your needs, from backgrounds (image, color, gradients etc.), over Linktypes (like buttons or just one link over the whole tile) till effect-overlays. Tiles has an great, 100% Ajax driven, backend editor, which enables you to easily create and manage your Tile-Galleries in no time.

Mandrill for Joomla! Say hello to transactional emails!

Sat, 12 May 2012 10:14:05 +0100

3 inShare 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: Uses MailChimp's awesome email delivery engine Tracks opens and clicks Automatically adds Google Analytics tracking data to the URLs in the mail Has pretty, visual reports of the email results Allows you to tag the emails and see your stats filtered by tag And maybe last but not least - the Mandrill service offers a powerful API! Since APIs are for geeks MailChimp contacted us to create a Joomla plugin for the normal user. And there we have it! Mandrill for Joomla is a plugin that you can install as any other Joomla plugin. After the installation all you need to do is provide your Mandrill API key and from now on the mails that your Joomla site is going to send are going to be send through Mandrill's API. On the Mandrill's website you will be able to see the clicks, open rates. The plugin also tags the messages by component name, view and task. This way you can easily identify what messages are send, from where and when. For more information about the way the plugin works and what limits there are check out the documentation. The plugin is completely free, just head to our download section and get it! (to see the download section you need to be a registered user) If you need any support just drop us a line in the forum section for Mandril: https://compojoom.com/forum/116-mandrill-for-joomla

JComments Mobile Joomla! extension

Fri, 11 May 2012 23:00:15 +0100

Free your community from their desktops and let them keep interacting on the go - the JComments Mobile Joomla! Extension will adapt JComments for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and other smartphones. Mobile Joomla! is happy to announce that the JComments mobile extension is now available. As usual, the team has spent a great deal of time in designing the user interface and custom-fitted it for the most typical mobile use cases. The features include reading, writing, replying with quote, liking, disliking, and viewing attachments in comments. All is HTML5 and CSS3 powered by JQuery Mobile and Elegance Mobile Joomla! template. Highlights and key features: � Supports JComments 2.3.x and up � Read, write, reply, reply with quote, like and dislike � Attachment support for mobile � Displays Attachments � iPhone App mode for full screen browsing � HTML5, CSS3, SEO � Joomla! 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 2.5 compatible � Full compatibility with all Mobile Joomla! Extensions For more information and screenshots, please visit: http://www.mobilejoomla.com/extension/jcomments-mobile-joomla-extension The JComments mobile extension comes with a full year of priority support, documentation, and product improvement updates. JComments Mobile Joomla! Extension has been designed in cooperation with the JoomTune core team, and each purchase will support their development. If you want to see how the extension looks like, just navigate to www.mobilejoomla.com with your mobile phone and browse to the blog! Mobile Joomla! are continuously adding more supported Mobile Joomla! extensions to its extension directory. The team is happy to hear from Joomla! extension or template providers that are interested in getting robust mobile support in place: hello at mobilejoomla dot com.

EasyBlog 3.5 beta is out!

Fri, 11 May 2012 04:25:30 +0100

The wait is finally over! EasyBlog now comes with possibly the most features in a Joomla blog extension ever have in the market. The beta release highlights all of the new additions and enhancements that an ultimate blogging extension for Joomla should be. Some of the killer features: - Multilingual blog posts (Joomla 1.6 onwards only) - More SEO control (Yes, you can control how you want the URL to look like) - New media manager (Something that I would urge you to try) - Integrations with JomSocial album and Flickr (Some really cool feature here!) - 4 brand new blog themes! - Extensive integrations with EasyDiscuss 2.0 - Multiple comments support (as many comment integrations as you want!) - Pinterest Integrations - LiveFyre Comment, Komento integrations, and many more! More details at http://stackideas.com/blog/entry/easyblog-35-beta-released.html You need to a subscription plan in order to try out the beta version. Get it at http://stackideas.com/easyblog.html#subscription Email to sales@stackideas.com and ask for a small discount.

Rapidly build amazing photo galleries with Joomla! simplicity and the best of jQuery effects and ani

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 01:03:04 +0100

RapidPlugins released nice joomla image gallery component RapidGallery . Rapidly build amazing photo galleries with Joomla! simplicity and the best of jQuery effects and animations. Joomla simplicity and the best of jQuery effects and animations. Designed to be conflictless and scalable, strongly AJAX-powered. Easy and professional image manipulations. Rapid use, high flexibility, instant results simply moving files. It works on tablets and smartphones too. ------------ - Designed to be conflictless both with other extensions and other 3rd party javascripts - Tested to be scalable (strongly AJAX powered) - Manipulate images with special effects (transparent rounded corners, transparent reflection, drop shadow, logo watermark) - Includes more than 10 different customized gallery skins/themes adapted for use with RapidGallery and tested on all major web browsers - Smart automatic image resizing (symmetric on width/height or fixed dimensions, keeping transparency, accepting various sizes and formats) - Pagination - Multilingual image captions - Easy to manage: just moving files (no xml files to update, no backend to add items, just move image files) - Customizable style - Custom sorting. Define your own order or apply a predefined sorting criteria - Embed in any template position (with the Module) and in any content (with the Plugin) - Translated in several languages: English, Fran�ais, Deutsch, Italiano, #1088; #1091; #1089; #1089; #1082; #1080; #1081;, Espa�ol - No Flash plugin is required, many skins/themes perfectly work on tablets/smartphones

WordPress for Joomla now ready for Joomla 2.5

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:17:14 +0100

corePHP is excited to announce the latest release of WordPress for Joomla. Not only is it ready for Joomla 2.5 platform but we also updated to the latest version of WordPress. You can read more about the update at: http://wordpress.org/news/2011/12/sonny/ We want to thank everyone for your patience as we have worked hard on polishing this release. The latest release is ready for download for Joomla! 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 and 2.5. For update instructions please read below: It is always recommended to make a backup. So please do so before moving forward. Once a backup is made all you need to do is install the latest package Download now http://www.corephp.com/joomla-products/wordpress-for-joomla.html We hope you enjoy this update! Best, Michael Pignataro VP of Operations

Win an extreme makeover for your Joomla! website

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:19:18 +0100

Great news! Here is your chance to win an extreme makeover for your Joomla! website! Mobile Joomla! has partnered up with some of the worlds top Joomla! companies to provide an opportunity of a lifetime for one lucky Joomla! user. You may know that Joomla! has entered a new age with the latest version Joomla! 2.5 launched in January this year. Consequentially it's been announced that Joomla! 1.5 and 1.7 have reached the end of their lifecycles, and only major security fixes will be done for both until release of 3.0 in September 2012. So considering a 2.5 upgrade rather soon might be a good idea. The winner of the �Joomla 2.5 Upgrade Contest� will get their Joomla! site completely rebuilt, enhanced, and SEO-optimized on the new Joomla 2.5 platform. In addition, the winner will also receive a premium mobile Joomla! website and Joomla! 2.5 training courses. Mobile Joomla! will specifically grant the winner free licenses of the JQuery Mobile based Elegance Mobile Joomla! Template, Kunena Mobile Joomla! Extension, plus our other upcoming premium products. Entering to win is free, easy, and open to anyone who has a Joomla! website - simply visit the contest website to participate! http://savvypanda.com/Joomla25Contest All entries must be submitted by Wednesday May 16, at 11:59PM. The winner will be announced on May 31. Joomla! companies involved in this promotion: * Savvy Panda is one of leading U.S. Joomla! Web Design firms specializing in providing premium Joomla! web solutions including websites, custom templates, extension development, developer and user support and more. * Anything Digital is a Joomla! extensions add-on provider offering unique apps for SEO, site security, calendaring, event registration, content translation, on-site search and more. * Mobile Joomla! offers an extension used to create a custom mobile version of your Joomla! website. They are the leading experts in mobile Joomla! websites. * JoomlaBlogger is one of the web�s premier Joomla! news, tips, tutorials and how to websites. They offer free, high-quality content for Joomla! users. * OS Training is the number one Joomla!, Wordpress Drupal training programs. They offer both online and in-classroom courses for beginner, intermediate and advanced users. Good luck everyone!!

Kunena Mobile Joomla! Extension Now Available!

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:19:08 +0100

Your favorite Joomla! forum extension Kunena has landed on Mobile Joomla! Now your Kunena forum will also rock iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7, and countless other phones. Mobile Joomla! is proud to offer Kunena Mobile Joomla! Extension in cooperation with the Kunena core team. This premium extension will turn your desktop web Kunena forum into stylish and gorgeous kick-ass mobile version. View sections, categories, and posts; read, post, and reply; view attachments. It's all HTML5 and CSS3 powered by JQuery Mobile and Elegance Mobile Joomla! template. Highlights and key features: * Both Kunena 1.7 and soon-to-be-released 2.0 are supported * Displays sections, categories, child categories, posts * Allows read, post, reply * Displays Attachments * iPhone App mode for the front page * HTML5, CSS3, SEO * Joomla! 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 2.5 compatible To see how the extension looks like, just navigate to www.mobilejoomla.com with your mobile phone and browse the forums.