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.

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.

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.

Are you already following? Yes Joom!Fish also posts it's most recent news, information on twitter. At http://twitter.com/joomfish. As we are even answering some support questions via this forum it might be a good idea to follow us there. It can also be that we are going post some other pretty interesting infos there - why only blog?

Beside twitter you can also find information about the Joom!Fish project on various other platforms and web portals. If you are missing us on one of them, let us know. If it makes sense for us we will try to provide you more information about the project in your preferred environment as well.

It's about a year ago that we started our Joom!Fish Club. The new extensions, support and other services are helping more and more Joom!Fish club members. Of course we will celebrate this within our community. At the moment we discuss various ideas and options how to celebrate. One thing is for sure it will be like a little firework - or may be a big firework?

One thing is pretty sure, we will say thank you to all our club members of the first year. What does it mean? Everybody who signed up for a club membership until the 30th of June 2009 will take part in a set of "lucky draws". It doesn't matter if you are signed up for one month or a year, if you won your membership during one of our Joomla!Days or if you signed up on the 30th of June. Everybody who is in our database on the 30th of June 23.59 MET - is able to win. What? Stay connected and you will find out. Also make sure you are following us on twitter, who knows may be there will be some party too .

It is always very interesting if people asked you about information because they prepare a presentation of Joom!Fish. The last person asking was Jean-Marie Simonet (aka infograf768) who prepared a workshop during the Joomla!Day France 2009. Today I got his slides and it looks for me that his workshop titled "Internationalisation de Joomla et Joomfish" ("Internationalization with Joomla and Joom!Fish) was great fun. They covered basically all of the important aspects from understanding the various problems related to languages, the language system within Joomla and the usage of Joom!Fish. You can download his presentation (Frensh) as well as all other presentations from the event on the site.

I'm pretty sure many others have already presented Joom!Fish in their language. May be you can let us know and we can create a documentation section of third party presentation, documentations and other information in the various languages.

Many thanks again to Jean-Marie and the whole team in Paris. This was already the 3rd Joomla!Day in the capital of France and I'm sure it's not the last one.

The last few days I looked often to the frontpage of joomlacode.org our platform to provide the Joom!Fish downloads. The reason was that the mark of 700.000 downloads was pretty close. Today I checked again and joomlacode stats show already 702.219 downlaods - This is pretty amazing! Thanks to all users. Ok there is still a gap to the number 1 extension JEvents with their 1.3 million downloads - but we gonna work on this as well. Just the full package of latest version 2.0.3 was already downloaded 39.659 times. This indicates that a growing number of multilingual websites are build using the new versions Joomla and Joom!Fish. 

To improve the user experience of Joom!Fish we will focus on our own website first. Within the next weeks we are going to update a lot of general content, documentation, showcase and other information. This all goes along with the preparations for the next version Joom!Fish 2.1 that should be released soon. The features for this version are already defined by our users using the feedback system. The changes in the translation UI and some other features to improve the usability are the primary fields of our work. Together with the teams from joomlaworks and yootheme we are working on a solution to support the CCK based extensions and allow a smooth integration for their translations.

Again thanks to all users, contributors, developers and the moderation team in the forum for the great work and the positive feedback we get. Keep on sending us more feedback and ideas and wishes to improve Joom!Fish. And hopefully see all of you during the Joomla!Day 2009 in Germany (www.joomladay.de) on which we will present a couple of new developments.

As promised I prepared the patch files for the Joom!Fish 2.0.3 package. All of these files are available on our download page or in the Joom!Fish project at Joomla!Code.

The patch files include the full patch of your Joomla installation so that you can just overwrite your file system. Of course a backup of your existing installation is highly recommended to do before the upgrade. The new version of Joom!Fish works without any changes to the database or underlying structure. If you have further questions to the upgrade please visit our documentation and the forum. 

With the version 1.5.10 Joomla changed some the structure of install packages. The bug report explains some of the changes in which it became clear that the understanding of having files in a sub-directory of your package was somehow wrong. It is explained nicely by others that the <installfile> attribute is already very old and that the understanding of what is the correct behavior shifted over the time.

The Joom!Fish project released today an updated version 2.0.3 which we had already prepared for the new release of Joomla. The fix for this installation topic is also included in the package and this allows you to use the latest version with your new Joomla 1.5.10 installation.

If you use an existing 1.5.9 installation and perform an upgrade to the latest version using one of the existing patch files you will have no problems at all, as this topic refers only to new installations. For upgrading the latest version of Joom!Fish you can just perform an upgrade process within your Joomla extension installer. We will provide suitable patch files shortly.