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.

The JoomFish development team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the latest JoomFish 2.1 package to the general public. With a number of smaller bug fixes the version 2.1.6 of Joom!Fish was released today. The version focus on stability and ease of use of all our features. The version goes along with several minor fixes and changes made to our additional extensions.

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 2.1.6 is not compatible with Joomla 1.6!

As a sponsor of the J and Beyond 2011 conference we are very happy to support one of our community members to join this conference. Now if you are interested in joining J and Beyond 2011 we suggest you are posting a message in our forum and explain why we should pick exactly you. If you present something about your projects and site this would be definitely a good argument - so make sure you are not missing the end of the CFP on 4th of March.

J and Beyond is one of the important Joomla and Open Source conferences we will support this year. With speakers from all around the world we are very happy to support the world wide user community as well as the developers around the globe. Having them all on one conference was very helpful last year and this is why we decided to continue our engagement in this initiative. We are looking forward to meeting you in Kerkrade this year.

The JoomFish team wishes all our contributors, customers, users and everybody else enjoying the multilingual solution for Joomla all the best for the new year 2011.

2010 was exciting for us as we continued waiting on the next main Joomla release and the features it will include. Now short before christmas the first release candidate is published and already people asking us when the compatible JoomFish release will be published. The compatible JoomFish release will be version 3.0 and it will be a mostly rewritten version to fit to the requirements of Joomla. As it is already quite common the framework of Joomla changed much more than it was planned in the very first beginning and we will deal with these changes now.

In the meantime we plan at least 2 more public releases of the current 2.x series for Joomla 1.5, attending J and Beyond 2011 and may be one or two other Joomla!Days world wide. Beside producing new versions of our core and add on extensions we also will work on improving our documentation. It is a never ending story as producing really good documents is a complicated and time consuming business.

Last but not least we like to express our special thank you to Carolien de Groot. In 2010 she helped as a core team member to work and coordinate the forum activities, documentation and many hours testing our work. As she took on a new personal job she is now moving on staying as contributor but not core team member in the project environment. Please join in a special farewell for here in our forum. 

Once again all the best for all of you and we are looking forward to the 2011 ideas, feedbacks, challenges and projects realized with the multilingual JoomFish extension.

The Joom!Fish development team is proud to announce the public release of Joom!Fish 2.1.5. With this release the team fixed a series of bugs reported in the past via the various channels. Further more we improved the release to be completely compatible with PHP 5.3 and the current Joomla 1.5 versions.

This version was released already several month ago to all our Club members. Together with the existing add-ons the version proofed to be stable and a reliable version for managing multilingual websites within your Joomla CMS. In order to avoid confusion related the version numbers we decided to rename the currently available club release to the up-comming release 2.2. As usual all Club Members will be able to download this up-coming release within the next few days in a re-branded version.

We are looking forward to your feedback about this version and created a new dedicated public forum for this release. Further information about the club member benefits, additional JoomFish extensions and available support options can be found on our updated download page.

The whole team likes to thank all of our users, contributors and especially the club members for the feedback and suggestion that lead to this new release.