The JoomFish team is happy to announce the immidate availability of the the version 2.5.1 and some cute new features.

We like to ask our community to continue reporting issues within github as this helps us to improve the current version further more. The update includes bugfixes within the language manager and the splash screen stays away if you tell him to do so. Within the new version you also get a nice plugin that allows you to link existing articles with each other and indicate existing translations this way.

What is next?

We are still searching for ways to improve our support service. At the moment we are actively searching for new contributors that help to answer questions related the new versions. If you are interested sent a PM to one of our moderators. The contribution license will allow you to access all membership areas and give you even more access to our developers if needed.

The translation teams started to translate the new 2.5 series using transiflex. The first plackages are completed and with the relase of 2.5.1 we will push the latest changes there. As soon as the most important packages are available we will update our download sections and provide the additional files for you.

More club addons will be migrated to Joomla 2.5 within the next weeks and we will continue to update our download area regular. Based on the current feedback we will update especially the management and translation extensions.

Last but not least the migration is starting to make progress. Various teams from the specialized extensions got in touch with us recently and we are currently working with them to integrate the JoomFish requirements to migrate your existing tables automatically into the new content and menu structure for having a native support of these extensions within Joomla 2.5 and JoomFish 2.5.

Having a multilingual website is one part of the game. Of course you like to have a perfect template for it as well. Sometimes combining a template with the additional requirements of multilingual sites isn't that easy.

Based on the own experience I'm wondering if there are template designers out there that do not only implement cool new features, frameworks or responsive HTML5 but also keep in mind the basic m12l requirements. I'm thinking about

• perfectly configured place for the language changing module
• nicely integrated flags (may be special flags) or designs for the text/drop down
• LTR as well as RTL support
• Different images for the languages (language dependent images are most critical to localize)

Let us know if you work on such templates and especially if you would may be interested to provide the JoomFish club one of these templates once every 3 month. We would love to enrich the service for our club members with such a template.

We are proud to start our year of the 10th anniversary of JoomFish (formally known as MambelFish) with the stable release of the new JoomFish 2.5 core component. As of the 1st of January 2013 the package is available for our club members as download.

The new core component offers various enhancements that are contributing to the new techniques and opportunities given by the Joomla 2.5 core system. The most remarkable one is the fact that starting with this release JoomFish stores articles and menu items directly within the core database tables. With JoomFish you add some additional functionallity to track the changes and manage your translations as it was done before. Now this is the first step to get a fully featured translation management system on top of the your open source CMS of choice.

With the new feature we integated a new extension interface that will allow 3rd party developers to more easily interact with JoomFish. All extensions especially enhanced for JoomFish will be able to enricht their features with multilingual features and translation management without implementing it themselves.

How can I get it today?

As usual for our project you have two options. The first one is the supported club membership that will grant you access to the latest package downloads. These downloads are updated after major version upgrades in the code and you have a dedicated support forum for your questions and the team support. Check out our download page for more information or use the direct link to the club membership area. As free alternative you can download JoomFish from our github repository. This version is unsupported and might change as development continues.

What is next?

We are currently designing a nice way to migrate the information from existing Joomla 1.5 & JoomFish 2.2 version. This being said the most important task will be the update to the latest versions of these. There are some ideas about some more additional extensions and tools in our minds. But first we like to discuss with you what should be done next.

After a successful Beta testing period of Joom!Fish 2.5 the project team is preparing the final stable release of the long awaited new JoomFish 2.5 extension. The update is primarily focused on the Joomla 2.5 core and will create a lot of opportunities for multilingual websites based on the current platform.

As the feature sets and requirements for the two platforms Joomla 1.5 and 2.5 are quite different and we still see a lot of needs for current Joomla 1.5 sites we also decided to restructure our support services differently in future. The goal is to provide the required services on a fair price for the different needs. This is why we will drop our current bronze (1 month memberships) by end of November 2012. The silver membership will get a freshup of the price and allow you to focus on your Joomla 1.5 needs. All existing pro extensions will be available for an affortable price in one single package. The gold club will change into the Joom!Fish future club that allows you to access all 2.5 and upcoming 3.0 features and packages directly on our site.

As we see more and more multilingual features being integrated into the Joomla Core the JoomFish extension will also change its focus in future. We like to express that the core integration of multilingual features is a great opportunity for the Joomla CMS and we are very happy to see this being accepted by the PLT finally. What focus the JoomFish project will have in future is not clear yet - your suggestions are very welcome. It is clear that will continoue the support for the Joomla system even though the kind of support might change.

Stay tuned for the upcoming news and releases.

Today the JoomFish team is proud to announce the public availibility of the new version 2.2.3. Actually the 2.2 versions are not totally new to all our club members, but it is the first public release available. You can just download it from our page and enjoy an easy way to get a multilingual site assembled with Joomla. Details about the changes and how to install the new version can be found in our project roadmap.

If you have use JoomFish before you need to backup and uninstall your old (2.0 or 2.1) version before! This is related to several changes we did on the file structure of the extension to make it more compatible with the structures of Joomla 2.5 and future versions. During the uninstall process your database tables and translations are not deleted and will be available after installing the new version. To install the new version please use the Joomla extension manager. It shall show you a screen with all components, modules and plugins installed if successful. If you have any further questions, please feel free to post in our forum or visit our documentation pages.

We like to take the opportunity and thank all our users that continue to give us feedback and detailed information to improve JoomFish to what it is. We will continue as well to make JoomFish better every release. Of course this includes also current and future Joomla releases as well ;-).

Note: JoomFish 2.2.3 is not compatible with Joomla 1.6, 1.7 or 2.5! This release is meant for all our Joomla 1.5 customers to ease the process of migration in the next steps. The version 2.2 changes the language management to the behavior from Joomla 2.5 already and the table structure is aligned. A new version JoomFish 2.5 for the Joomla 2.5 series is in preparation and will be released as a first beta version to our club members shortly.

Many people asked about the JoomFish project recently. It looked like the project is not existing anymore. It looked like we are not supporting Joomla the way we did. Yes it looked like this, but actually it is all wrong.

The Joomla project made a tremendouse shift in its release and development strategy lately. With focusing on two different products (Plattform and CMS) and with time based releases the project now builds a plannable and predictable skeleton for professional 3rd party teams to build on their work on it. In the past each single release of Joomla was a major milestone and your update was not fast enough you have been lost in space. In the last year we saw two updates of the same kind and many, many people thought that they build their new website on a new stable version. My personal opinion is that both releases 1.6 and 1.7 had been pretty stable and perfectly for developers to test, learn and develop their extensions against them - however I have never recommended any of these versions to a client as a stable, long term reliable and not changing version. And this was excatly what the Joomla team said too. They have been very predictable in their work and now 2.5 is about to be released and with this we get a new long term, stable release for Joomla CMS including a stable plattform 11.4 - great!

Did we as JoomFish team waited all way long? No. We tested, we contributed to the core to help to overcome some issues we encountered and we prepared our next version for this new plattform and CMS. As stated all day long we have not released anything for 1.6 or 1.7 as this was pure development testing and not meant for any production usage. We shared our new github repository that allows very simple usage of the jf-future package and also worked on the new 2.2 release, the last one for Joomla 1.5 series.

To sum up, the JoomFish project is not dead, it still supports Joomla and even stronger now and of course we will release a version for Joomla 2.5!

First we will release JoomFish 2.2 with some additional enhancements for the general public. This build will be our transfer build to the new Joomla CMS 2.5 code based. This release is planned for this week.

Second we will release a Beta build of JoomFish 2.5 to our club members. This beta build is tested against Joomla CMS 2.5 B2 and should work in general. From eairly adopters we know already some bugs and will fix them on our way to the stable release. I personally assume that we will provide a stable version of the core features within a few weeks.

Last but not least we will provide updates to all our own add-ons and some new addtional features for easy migration and management of your translations. And of course to an update on our own website - as usual this comes last as it is not as important as your code.

Many people asking us quite often how to structure, prepare and build their multilingual websites. In fact often people start without thinking about a multilingual website and then they end up adding more and more translations to it. Based on this experience I created a slide deck that was presented first on the Joomla!Day in Athens 2011. The first part of the slides discuss the primary discussions you need to do while thinking about the idea that your site can become multilingual. Starting from the decisions related automated or manual translations until the facts of the cultural influence your new audience will bring. The second part of the presentation shows some best practices and possibilities how you can simplify the integration process for yourself as well as for your customers.

As I like to make this a little series about how multilingual websites can be build and what is important for them I'm very much interested in your feedback and experience. Please share your feedback to the presentation with me in our JoomFish forum or comment it on slideshare.

During J and Beyond 2011 the whole JoomFish team (developers, moderators and 3rd parties) meet and it was a great opportunity for us to talk about strategy, next releases and what else we need to have a look on. Before I'm going to update all our road-map documents let me summarize some of the outcome here in a brief blog post.

Community interaction and support

First of all let's talk about our support and communication towards the community. Our forum is the primary interactive channel we use and this will stay as it is. We will announce new releases and other project related information primarily in the forum and use twitter and other social media just for additional comments. If you have questions please raise them in the forum and not in comments, tweets or somewhere else. We are not regularly following these platforms.

To easy the usage of the forum we are going to restructure the sub-forums and will create a forum for each major release. So you will be able to find a 2.1 release sub-forum in the public area as well as a 2.2 release sub-forum within the club area. As soon as 2.2 is becoming the next public available forum we will move this sub-forum to the public community area. Feel free to answer all your questions related the core extension within these forums. To ease support make sure you post according to the version you use.

For all our add-ons we will create sub-forums as well. You will find a forum for JoomFish Plus Frontend Editing UI as well as the other add-ons soon within the club forum folder. The new forum groups will help to simplify the support and allow for a more detailed help in these cases.

Joom!Fish roadmap

According to the currently published development strategy of Joomla the version 1.6 and later again the version 1.9 will be those with long term support. Some other sources speak about 1.8 being the next with long term support as 1.5 has this kind of support already.

Our current vision is that 1.5 is the most reliable and stable version of Joomla and it is still maintained and down-loadable. Based on that we will support this version of Joomla at least until end of 2011 and plan to release version 2.5 as the last and final release for this code base. The result is that we will have 3 more feature releases of Joom!Fish with the version numbers 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5. The features are based on your feedback in our feedback system and include e.g. tabbed translation editing as well an optimization for the usage of 3rd party CCK's and other bigger extensions.

As 1.6 becomes the new origin of the new Joomla framework and CMS code base we will continue to finish this development and release it under the version number 2.6 as a migration scenario. The version 2.6 will be based on the JoomFish 2.2 code base and only enables it to be compatible with the Joomla 1.6 core. There will be no innovative features and technologies being implemented. With the versions 2.7, 2.8 and 2.9 we will provide versions that are compatible to the respective releases of those versions for the Joomla 1.5 code base.

The JoomFish version 3.0 becomes a brand new release with an innovative new way of editing translations and much more features. Some first ideas are discussed but you should not expect this version before 2012. Most of the important other features will be integrated earlier in the 2.x releases.

Events and more

We had a great experience with J and Beyond and we will continue to support events in the future. Next is the Joomla!Day in Greece and in autumn we will support the Joomla!Day in Hamburg Germany and the Joomla!Day in New York City. If you like to learn more about Joom!Fish, talk about the concepts or more one of these events is the best opportunity to meet with us.

I have been making significant progress on the implementation of Joomfish in Joomla 1.6.

The code is based on Joomfish 2.2 and will be called Joomfish 2.3.  The main outstanding issues are:

• The translation of parameters or menus and modules etc.  This is a complex exercise and will require careful thought on the best way to implement this since this code in Joomla changed significantly from Joomla 1.5 - 1.6.
• Translation of URLs in the router.

We hope to have a club preview version available for testing by club members.

Geraint

With the 2.1.7 release of JoomFish we are happy to fix several bugs and reports we got lately. The release continuos in a row of further improvements of the JoomFish core extension. You can just download it from our page and enjoy an easy way to get a multilingual site assembled with Joomla.

If you have use JoomFish before you can just use the Joomla extension manager to update to this latest version and with this upgrade your files. The database will not be changed and therefore the translations will be available directly afterwards. Of course we recommend to do a backup of your website before doing any change to the system. 

We like to take the opportunity and thank all our users that continue to give us feedback and detailed information to improve JoomFish to what it is. We will continue as well to make JoomFish better every release. Of course this includes also current and future Joomla releases as well ;-).

Note: JoomFish 2.1.7 is not compatible with Joomla 1.6! But I can say that we are heavily working on a new version and I'm pretty sure we can expect some showcases during the upcoming events ;-). So make sure you are registered to J and Beyond 2011 and do not miss anything.