The new version of Joomla is coming along its third Beta was released this week. Within the new version of Joomla you will see some of the suggestions the JoomFish team set out in a white paper 2 years ago. The idea of the white paper was to improve the overall tagging and filtering of content within the Joomla database based on their language. The development team working on Joomla 1.6 interpreted the white paper in some aspects differently than the intention we had however the overall goal to improve in the language management of Joomla itself is achieved quite well.

The primary change moves the language relationship (parameter in articles) into its own field for all of the primary tables of the Joomla database. This change will allow everybody to create a simple website with different language depended articles based on the Joomla core only. The primary feature of JoomFish - the management of translations and the dependency between an original and its translation - will not be implemented in the Joomla 1.6 version.

This is an exciting development for the JoomFish extension as we can now focus on a more optimized integration and storage of language dependant versions while keeping our focus on the management process itself. With the positive and encouraging new development process of the Joomla core we decided to postpone our next 2.1 release for a few weeks to implement some changes which focus on a smooth transition process to the new Joomla 1.6 core. This means that you will see in the next version of JoomFish some changes which are dedicated to simplify your upgrade path from Joomla 1.5 + JoomFish 2.1 to Joomla 1.6 # JoomFish 2.x.

The development of a Joomla 1.6 compatible version of JoomFish started already with the conceptual phase. During the event J and Beyond we discussed necessary steps for the integration of CCK extensions and also our plan for releases related the next generation of Joomla. These discussions lay down a clear roadmap for JoomFish 2.1 to be prepared for Joomla 1.6 but not yet compatible with it.

Our commitment is that the upgrade from JoomFish 2.1 to the next generation JoomFish that is compatible with Joomla 1.6 will be smooth. And the 1.6 compatible version of JoomFish will be released soon after the final release of Joomla. Of course pre-releases will be available for all our club members.

End of May 2010 a real international conference about the CMS Joomla takes place in Wiesbaden, Germany. With J and Beyond Joomfish supports the second event as sponsor and will bring our whole team to Wiesbaden. Our idea is to have a 1 hour slot somewhen beside the normal conference to discuss the future of Joomfish. Get your feedback, wishes and ideas.

The whole Joomfish team is quite excited about the opportunity to meet again during such an awesome conference. This year having speakers such as Andrew Eddie, Hannes Papenberg, Steve Burge, Matthias Verraes, Sandro Groganz just to name a few, is quite impressive. I also know that Matthew Philogene will present a JoomFish based project from South Africa and many more Joomfish users, agencies and others will be on site.

So the big question is: Are you coming to the event? If yes please add a short comment here and may be tell us what is important for you during the event, related to Joomfish and in general. With these information we can may be prepare a bit and make sure that you get the answers you are looking for.

We are looking forward to meeting you in less than 2 weeks @ J and Beyond 2010, Wiesbaden, Germany #jab10

In the second half of March we've held a Showcase Site contest. Thanks for everyone who showed us the full extent of Joom!Fish. A lot of websites were submitted (about 100) and in the voting the following 3 websites were the winners:

JoomlaDay Bangkok 2009

This website has been submitted by Akarawuth Tamrareang (ninekrit) and the site has been made by Marvelic. It is a two language website (Thai and English) with the goal to provide information about the Joomla!day held in Bangkok.

website: http://www.joomladay.in.th

App 'n Web

This website has been submitted by App'n web. It is a website about an IT-company in two languages: English and French.

website: http://www.app-n-web.ch

Rahmi ARIK's Homepage

This website is made by Rahmi Arik (Chapodos). The goal of this website is to share with his community. He has also published his genealogy on a private part of the website. The website is in two languages: French and Turkish.

website: http://www.rahmiarik.com

You can see all other submissions in the showcase forum and you can submit your own site also, to show off the power of Joom!Fish.

About 100 websites from all over the world have been submitted by the Joomfish community for the March 2010 celebration contest. We are very excited about it as most of these sites have been submitted within 4 days before the closing at March 16th 2010. Now is it on the Community to choose among the best multilingual websites in our showcase. Check out the Joomfish Forum to review the websites and afterwards vote for your favorite multilingual website.

The poll is closing 30th of March 2010 and after that we will announce the winning sites. The top 5 sites will be presented in blogs from our site including additional information. So let's see what the community opinion is.

Did you realized that Joomfish is one of the top 5 downloaded extensions of Joomla? A couple of days ago the Joomfish project had reached the magic number of 1.000.000 downloads on Joomlacode. As Joomlacode is not that old it counts only the downloads sine its release in 2006. In 2008 the Joomfish forum was released and today it has already more than 10.000 registered users and about 25.000 threads. All these numbers are impressive and a really good reason to celebrate a bit.

In March 2010 the Joomfish project will celebrate you, the users, supporters, contributors and all others that use Joomfish or help us to make it such a great success. End of the month we will visit the JoomlaDay Bordeaux and during the event we will release Joom!Fish 2.1 to the general public.

As it is our goal to celebrate you we start a JoomFish website contest today. Please submit your Joomfish based website in our Forum until the 15th of March 2010. After this date we will start a community voting for the best website and the winner will be announced end of March 2010. Beside a front-page article about your website more prices will be awarded. Do not miss this unique opportunity to present your work or projects of your customers, friends and organizations.

The year 2009 was a quite exciting year with presentations of JoomFish on various events, JoomlaDays and many, many talks in our forum and other places. It was our great wish to make sure the overlay map doesn't show any white spots anymore. And actually there are no more white posts on it.

The top ten list of our visitors reads quite interesting too. With Germany, Italy and France on the first places we have quite known countries. Many people and friends reach us from there. Next year I will visit the JoomlaDay France in Bordeaux (21st of March 2010) and I will definitely talk to the team from Italy about visiting them as well. In Germany we are supporting the event "J and Beyond" which is going to start on May, 30th 2010 and I'm sure this will be really exciting. The group after these top three countries includes the USA, Spain, Netherlands, Russia, Poland, Greece and Canada. I have to say this is awesome as specially Russia, Poland and Greece are countries Joomfish was never presented from one of our team yet. Something that might need to change next year - let's see if there is an event we can visit.

With in total about 3.5 Million page impressions and about 500.000 unique visitors the site has reached quite some impressive figures and we really like to thank all those of you that support us in many ways. Meanwhile we have contributions for new videos, documentation, translation and a lot of feedback for the extension itself. It is great to see how the whole JoomFish community increases and it gives us quite some responsibility to improve JoomFish even more.

For 2010 we have quite some goals to achieve. The very first priority is the public release of JoomFish 2.1 and the improvements of our documentation. We are also working on a new website design and some more additional features which are planed very soon. Stay tuned for more news, releases and events we support. And one thing will be for sure in 2010 as well. JoomFish Core will stay free and open.

The Joomla!Day in the Barcelona an awesome event. Not only that Barcelona is a town with so much history but also the community here in Catalonia and Spain has done a great job. The event was having their business day yesterday and I was told that there are about 100 people talking to each other in three different locations. Today there are about 150 people watching the first talks from Johan, Lorenzo and later on myself.

You can follow us on the live stream http://yfrog.us/7029nz

More news, pictures and other stuff can be found on twitter with the tag #jd09es.

Description of the site:
Presentation of the institute and it's activities and Finland in the Benelux countries.

Our challenge is to provide high-quality translations into both languages sometimes in a very short time. Several translators are used to do the translation work.

Number of languages: 2 (nl and fr)

Web developer:
Janne Riihimäki / NagreMedia
Finnish Joomla! Professional
http://www.nagre.com

website: http://www.finncult.be

Voyages en Direct is a Travel Agency group based in Quebec, Canada. The website is to present the group at a B2B level and also caters to the B2C community that is looking to book their vacations.

Description of the integration : We worked with davidjoly.com to integrate the site, their 10 years experience in the Travel industry enabled us to create some custom modules we needed and along with the CCK Catalog from JXtended, Artio JoomSef and Joomfish we were able to create a Joomla «travel platform» that can now easily integrate the external tools of our booking partners.

Number of languages: 2 (French and English)
Pageviews of the site: Several thousands per day
Type of the site: Commercial - Travel agency

website: http://voyagesendirect.com

Hello my name is Carolien and as you might know I am new to the JoomFish core team for a month now. In the article I wrote about myself I said that I'd be improving documentation. I already started a bit, and for the public most notably, I created a JoomFish FAQ (which I actually wrote because I got annoyed answering the same questions over and over again...) and I already created some articles for club members only.

So let's write down some of my plans first. I'm planning on creating the following documentation:

• A user manual which are guides on how to install, configure, use, upgrade Joom!Fish and some troubleshooting. Maybe it also contains some other articles, but I'm not sure yet. This user manual is going to be available online and in PDF. This PDF is meant to be ready for printing, so the paper size will probably fit on US Lettersize as well as A4, the size I'm using in Holland. I'd like to be able to print my own user manual :)
• Reference documentation. In this part all options of each screen will be explained. Partly it's going to be the documentation which is already in the PDF available for club members and partly it's going to look like the Joomla! help screens.
• User manuals for club addons. I think all software should come with a user manual, so that is also for our club addons. The user manual will explain how to install, configure, use and upgrade the extension as well as some troubleshooting. (Yup it's the same setup as for the Joom!Fish component user manual)
• Tips and tricks. A lot of them are online already, like the performance tips or the css tips
• Developer documentation. I don't think I'm going to write it, I'm not a developer after all, but I'll ask Alex or Geraint to review the current documentation and update them.

Looks good eh?

And now you're thinking: when am I going to see this documentation?

I'm going to try to answer this question: First of all, some of this documentation is going to be available to club members only. This is for sure for the club addons documentation, because if you don't have access to the addons, you don't need the documentation either. If you disagree, please comment on this article :) The PDF is going to be club members only too. About the user manual: this is kinda tricky. At the moment I'm playing with the idea to create a short user manual for the public and to release an extensive one for the club members. This is still an idea and of course you could influence me by writing comments with good reasons to do otherwise. The reference documentation is also planned to be available for club members only. So what does the public get: tips & tricks, a certain type of user manual, developer documentation, troubleshooting documentation and everything else we think that should be released for the public.

Timeline: I'm aiming to get the user manual complete (and into PDF) before 2010 CET. I'm writing this gradually and every article I finished is available to club members already. For Club members, please make sure you're logged into to the frontend of this website and under Documentation, you'll find a menu called 'Club Documentation'. In there all the newly written articles and video's are available. As a club member I invite you to read the already available documentation. You have the possibility to rate it and if you have comments on it or you know some improvements or you noticed spelling errors, please use the comments of that specific article, e-mail me, or contact me any other way. All your comments are welcome, especially the ones about writing mistakes. I'm no native English speaker, so the articles definately are not flawless.

To sum up: we plan on lots of new documentation, but we can't do without you. I started writing, please give your input and comment on those writings constructively. This means: tell me what you read, how you understood this, what you expected to read and how you would improve it.