Yes, you read correctly.  All products available for download from this website are now available at a permanently discounted price.  Everything else is the same.  You can download one extension or all extensions for the one low price; the price has been reduced by up to 60%.

Visit the site downloads.

Although I’ve been fairly quiet with this site for a few months, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been busy.  This article covers a few items that you may find interesting.

As we head into 2019, many of us are gearing up for Joomla 4 which is currently in late alpha testing.  Apart from major makeovers in terms of look-and-feel, the biggest difference is that Joomla 4 will be the first version to exclusively use PHP 7.  This will mean that people currently relying on PHP 5.6{footnote}PHP 5.6 is approaching its end of life and what to do about it{/footnote} who anticipate moving to J! 4 will need to equip themselves with PHP 7.  This will also bring with it problems for website owners who may still be running much older versions of Joomla (e.g. J! 1.5 or J! 2.5) especially if they do not have the ability to run different versions of PHP on their webhosting platforms so that their differently-versioned J! websites will continue to operate.

In preparing ourselves for the eventual release of Joomla 4—some time in 2019—the Joomla development team has been tidying up Joomla's source code with the release of J! 3.9 in October this year.

J! 3.8.0 was released about a week ago and, as with any dot-zero release, the com­mu­nity’s initial reaction seemed to con­demn it rather than embrace or applaud it.  This article will look be­hind the storm of protest to examine the reasons why people have ex­perienced problems that, for the most part, were not caused by the release but were mainly the result of their ignorance about the update and why it is required.

The issues that people have complained about fall into two distinct groups:

1. There are legitimate issues relating to the J! 3.8.0 release:  the Joomla developers have responded to them and the fixes for those problems will be included in J! 3.8.1.
2. There are problems caused by the failure of a few third-party extension developers and, from what I’ve seen, those developers have already released fixes for their products.  Some extensions, however, may be incompatible with J! 3.8.0.  I don’t think it’s fair to lay the blame on anyone but I think that, in the first instance, we shouldn’t be too quick to accuse someone else for taking a wrecking ball to our websites.  We choose to use the software that we use and we’re ultimately responsible for taking appropriate steps to insure our sites against the possibility that one day they’ll go pear-shaped.

Despite these issues, J! 3.8.0 has been well received with nearly 6%[1] of [post J! 3.5.0] sites using this new release.  Installation, integration and implementation problems inevitably occur with new dot-zero releases.  We will examine a few of them in this article.

Things have changed a lot in the three-and-a-half years since I created this website.  From starting out with the idea that people might seek professional help with with Ku­ne­na (as well as to give me an opportunity to derive a small income by writing software specifically for that product), I soon realised that a boutique website dependent on the success of Ku­ne­na was never going to be profitable.  It may have been a “good idea” at one time but, as I observed the withering interest in Kunena, I decided to broaden my horizons—extend the purpose of this site to webcraft more generally (with Joomla in mind, of course)—while still offering fearless, independent commentary about the issues of the times.

My own forum needs notwithstanding, other Joomla software vendors’ sites—associated with Kunena—still continue to use Kunena and most of those have updated to a more current version than what I saw during my examination last year[1].  But this article is not about Kunena; this article celebrates several achievements that I’ve made in the past couple of months.  I have much to celebrate and the future of this site is looking better than ever.  If you’ve been here before and you haven’t already noticed what’s different then read on; as I wrote above:  “things have changed a lot” …

Ogplus for Joomla provides a convenient way to add Open Graph, Twitter Card and Google+ metadata [1] to your Joomla articles. The information stored in meta tags can be then automatically display your site content on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as shown in the following examples:

Plugin settings

There are four sets of parameters that control how the plugin adds Open Graph and Twitter tags to your site content and depending on whether a single article is being displayed or you’re showing a series of articles as a “blog view”[2].  There is no need to set most of parameters because they’re derived from article settings (e.g. title, image if it is included in article, site name, etc.).

Article Options

Featured Options