It was sometime in the middle of June, when my personal life took over for a while and I was almost not able to work on anything related to Joomla! and especially on the fish. It was not so long in the past when I posted some of the new features of Joom!Fish in my personal blog.

Between few trips abroad I was able to catch up an e-mail from Alex Kempkens regarding the new pre-rc version of Joom!Fish 1.8. Well, my first impression was … WOW. What happened for just a few weeks?

Joom!Fish 1.8 will be an amazing piece of software that will probably solve all known problems with multilanguage site in Joomla! (well, I don’t mean issues with 3PD add-ons).

So, what’s new?

1. CONTROL PANEL - When you open the Control Panel of the fish, you will see some new icons like Orphans and Manage Translations (more about it later). You will see on the right side an increased number of multilanguage searchbots and brand new admin module. You will see a tab showing a list of all unpublished translations (if there are such). You will see also initiative for support of the project (don’t worry, because it is still absolutely free like beer and still GPL).
2. MANAGE TRANSLATION – Contains three incredible functions that help tracking translations and their status: 
   1. Check translation status – shows the number of the translations by content element, language, published status and validity.
   2. Check original status – shows the number of items to translate in the original language as well as the progression of the translations in each language used.
   3. Copy original to language – allows you to copy all original data into specified language by content element. It even allows you to override the existing translations. 
3. ORPHANS – Allows you to see (and delete) orphan translations. Now your database will not contain bulk data.
4. TRANSLATION – Some graphical and logical changes were done in order to improve efficiency and easiness of use.
5. CONFIGURATION – Three new features were added:  
   1. Brand new option was added in what to show if there is no translation available. Together with the new Joom!Fish Alternative Language Contentbot, you can now show to your visitors that there is no translation available in their language plus a list of the available translations of the content item.
   2. Option how to store the original version (MD5 or MD5 plus clear text).
   3. Option to enable inactive languages for users that are at least managers.
6. CONTENT ELEMENTS – two new key features:
   1. Option to install content elements via browser (xml or zip file).
   2. Option to remove content elements via browser. 
7. LANGUAGE CONFIGURATION – list of new features:
   1. Option to delete language (this will remove all translations as well).
   2. Preview of the flag for each language.
   3. Split between the short code (used in browser addresses and flags) and the ISO code (used to translate the dates).
   4. Fallback option – option to show automatically translation in another language if no translation is available in the current language.
   5. Site configuration per language – option to translate the site title, meta data, offline message, favicon and even the live site address.
8. SEARCHBOTS - the searchbots logic have been improved significantly
9. OTHER BOTS – The Joom!Fish Alternative Language contentbot allows the new option to show all available translations for particular content item. 
10. ADMIN MODULE – When you open the list of content items in Joomla! you will see a brand new module in the top-right, which through 2 clicks allows you to open the article in translation mode.

Did I miss something? Probably I did. But Alex, Geraint, Robin and the rest of the people supporting the project did extremely good work in the two months of absence of me.

So probably, after I get more free time in couple of weeks, I will need to sit down and write a strong documentation on how to use all this new goodies.

 
You can see the corresponding screenshots in my personal blog .

Note: Joom!Fish 1.8 RC will be released very soon. Check out the annoucements.