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.
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.
The release 2.0.4 of JoomFish targets several minor issues related handling and usability as well as one important security issue that was reported recently. This is why it is highly recommended to update all your Joomfish powered websites with this latest release.
For your upgrade process you can easily install the full distribution package of JoomFish over your existing installation. Alternatively we provide several patch packages which allow an easy upgrade using FTP or other file access methods. You can find all files as well as further information to the new release on your download page.
With the release of 2.0.4 the Joomfish team will set the support for PHP4 to a deprecated status. The next release 2.1 will only support PHP5 based servers and adds the capabilities to support PHP 5.3. The next release, which is already available as pre-release for JoomFish Club members, will include several changes for the optimization of your translation process as well as better in-component documentation.
It is always astonishing how time is flying if you work in a great team. The first version of Mambelfish was published back in 2004 and with the move to Joomla the JoomFish project was born. Already back at this time Robin Muilwijk helped the project in translation of our UI and testing the solution for various languages and server scenarios. Together we developed the next (now current) generation of Joom!Fish, version 2.0. Robin was testing a lot and gave us a very useful feedback from his perspective as user and website integrator. End of the this month now Robin will leave the JoomFish core team, to focus on his family and work. He will stay connected with the project as contributor and still be around in our community. The whole team likes to thank him for his work in the core team over the past 4 years. Thanks a lot and and farewell. We hopefully see you once again on one of the events here in Europe.
With the growing community the Joomfish project is happy to have members such as Harri Susi and Carolien de Groot who are helping as moderators in our forum. Beside answering questions they also help to improve our structure and documentation of the project in various fields. We are very fortunate to announce today that Carolien will join the JoomFish core team starting with November this year. Her main focus will stay on the forum moderation and support for our club members. Beside this she will work in the fields of documentation and try to help a more complete base of tutorials, documents and information around the Joomfish project. So in the next time you can expect a growing base of information about how to use Joomfish or how to integrate Joomfish in your web solutions. If there are any ideas, suggestions you have please feel free to post us a note in our forum.
Once a year the whole JoomFish team tries to meets in person to discuss the current status of the project and suggestions to improve. This year we took the opportunity to have the JoomlaDay Germany in the middle of Europe to get the team together. The event was great and we had a lot of people, users and customers talking to us during the various sessions. It was really impressive to see what some of our users have achieved with the JoomFish core extension. We will start to blog about these solutions and projects soon.
Results of the summit
The JoomFish summit itself was great too. We enjoyed a couple of more hours within Bad Nauheim and had quite some talks about the forum, project, development and other things. We had the great opportunity to meet in person what is always a good thing. I hope next time Robin can make it too.
Some of the results you might have seen already. We discussed a simplification of our forum structure which was already implemented beginning this week. Also we discussed about the development status for 2.1 and future versions. We agreed that 2.1 will be released very soon. The primary focus will be on a better user experience and documentation for the core extension pack. Therefore we are doing some changes to the default values and also make sure that the documentation is completely updated. An other part of our work has been the complete check of the code so that it is PHP 5.3 compatible. The versions 2.2 and other will include some more features as those listed on our feedback site.
Thinking about how you could contribute to Joom!Fish?
With the success of our online video tutorials we decided to do some more work in this direction. If you have suggestions or wishes please let us know about them in our forum. We are also actively searching for a contributor who is able to support us with creating video tutorials for the starting steps with JoomFish. Our vision is to have about 5-10 video tutorials each of max 5 minutes that explain the first essential steps with multilingual websites and the installation, configuration and usage of JoomFish. If you are intersted also please use our fourm and we will get in touch with you.
The Joomladay 2009 in Germany was a very successful and interesting event. We had a couple of presentations related Joomfish and also direct talks to our users and developers using Joomfish. We like to thank all of the participants, speakers and friends visiting the event and made it such a success.
One of the talks we had on Friday was the presentation of multilingual websites with Joomfish and which steps you need to get your multilingual site up and running. The presentation attached is the introduction with some general information (in German). Most of the setup and integration was discussed on a live demo based on our demo website. We will add some more information, videos and documentations to our system soon.
The discussion with the participants of the talk was great. The overall feedback extremely positive and we have seen examples of websites with more than 12 languages integrated by members of the audience. Their feedback and comments are very motivating and we will carefully consider all we have been said.
Thanks again for joining our talk, the overall JoomlaDay 2009 in Germany and looking forward meeting you again in 2010.
Next week the Joomla!Day Germany happens. This is going to be one of the most exciting events this year in Europe and the Joom!Fish team is proud to support this event financially and with most of our team members.
During the Community Day on Saturday 26th of September 2009 you will be able to meet our developers and moderators.On this day we will also have a very interesting discussion about multilingual websites and their integrations within Joomla. We are very happy that Johan Janssens from the Nooku project will also attend this session and we can discuss the complete picture of of multilingual solutions and may be a bit of their future within Joomla 1.6/1.7.
In order to support this unique opportunity we today start a "lucky draw" for one Community Day Pass within our forum. Check out the post and sent a reply until the official deadline. At this time we will do a draw from all forum members that replied (Membership in the forum is for free - so make sure you have registered your account ;-) ).
We are looking forward meeting you in Bad Nauheim next week
The Joom!Fish Team
PS: If you don't have you tickets yet, there are very less still available. Make sure to crap them before the event is sold out.
There is a new site ranking Joomla based websites based on their traffic and some other criteria. Among those sites listed - currently the top 500 sites based on Alexa - Joomfish.net is the middle field with rank 275.
I think this is already a great success and would like to encourage the Joom!Fish community to rank our site there too. Lets see if they run second test if we can improve our site and the usage of the project within the Joomla sphere.
After two years without a Joomla!Day in Germany this year the event comes back with an ambitious lineup. Today the Joom!Fish team is honored to announce that we are officially sponsoring the whole event and will be present on all three days.
The event starts with the Virtuemart Day 2009 on Thursday 24th of September. This day promises to be the e-commerce information buster for everybody involved in the shopping sites based on Joomla. And I know that the virtuemart team is working on some very, very cool presentations. The Joom!Fish core developers Geraint Edwards and Alex Kempkens will be there as well and answer questions on how to integrate virtuemart with Joom!Fish to make your whole shop multilingual or even setup country specific shops with a lot of different tweeks, concepts and information.
On the Joomla! Business Day (25th of September) the Joom!Fish project will present the most recent version of the project and give a talk about the integration of multilingual websites. Geraint and Alex will be there to answer your questions and give you specific insides of issues related the project. During the whole day you can meet a lineup of Joomla and 3rd Party developers that will be outstanding. People claimed other Joomla!Days to be special because of their speakers - I would argue this Joomla!Day becomes special and outstanding because of the combination of speakers, developers and you!
For the Joomla! Community Day (26th of September) the Joom!Fish team is very honored that all our moderators (Carolien <aka caro86g> and Harri <aka Tassu>) as well as the rest of the Joom!Fish Core team will join in. On this day you can join in for a great discussion about multilingual websites and the solutions in general. We will have an open round to discuss solutions, concepts and related ideas for the future.
The list of people attending the event grows every day. And we highly suggest you make your final decision before the summer holidays - otherwise you never know if there is still a possible ticket available. Check out the Joomla!Day website and tell us if you come. Comments with - yes I'll be there are very welcome.
Looking forward meeting you in Bad Nauheim 24th to 26th of September 2009
Blogs
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.
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 
After two years without a Joomla!Day in Germany this year the event comes back with an ambitious lineup. Today the Joom!Fish team is honored to announce that we are officially sponsoring the whole event and will be present on all three days.
