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.

I promised myself that I'll stop working during the weekend, but it proves to be harder than expected...

Tobias Kuhn made some awesome changes to the code structure of the extension. His pull request was staying in github for too long time and I had to merge it :) We now have a base rule and report classes and that makes it really easy to write new check rules.

After more than 900h of work, we are proud to announce that Hotspots 3.0 is available for download. In this blogpost I'll try to outline the most notable changes.

The backend has a Control Center that gives you quick access to the last 5 published hotspots and to any backend view. In addition there is a feed module that will grab the latest blog post from compojoom.com related to hotspots. This way you can always be up to date with the development status or find out tips and tricks how to get the maximum out of it.

We are very excited to announce that for the last month we've been working hard to bring the Mailchimp experience back to Joomla. Thanks to Mailchimp the new "CMC - Mailchimp® for Joomla!™ " extension is going to be absolutly free!

The current feature list of CMC includes:

Yesterday I uploaded Hotspots RC1 to the download section (dev area). This is supposed to be the last version before a stable release. Of course if any major problems are found I reserve myself the right to release RC2 :)

This version fixes all reported problems since beta2 + ads a new content plugin that you can use to show a specific hotspot in your articles.

The JEDchecker is getting better and better!

For this release I would like to thank to Tobias Kuhn, Peter van Westen, Alain Rivest and of course last but not least OpenTranslators :)

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...

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: