There is a new Gold member plugin that enables site administrators to direct first time visitors from specific countries to specific languages/locales in Joomfish enabled Joomla websites.

You will require a subscription to http://www.maxmind.com/app/web_services#country to operate.

If this plugin is enabled then first time Joomfish will use the GeoIP plugin instead of the browser language determination to set the visitor's page language.  Note that if the visitor has chosen a language using the Joomfish module, or the language is specified by the URL or the Joomfish language cookie has been set then these are used instead of the GeoIP lookup - this means that the lookup is only used for "first time visitors".

If there is demand we could modify this plugin to force visitors from specific countries to see the site in a specific language.  This could be used, for exmple, on one language investment sites to ensure that visitors see the version of the content appropriate to their regulatory framework.  If you'd like this feature to be added - let me know through the club forum,

Geraint

We are getting closer to the final release of Joomfish 2.0 but felt we should release a Beta2 instead of going to a Release Candidate - the reason for this is that we have made some significant changes since the first beta was released. - these relate largely to performance and we think you'll like what you see.

There are other articles on the site relating to maximising performance and configuration of Joomfish 2.0. 

New Features

There are a number of new features in Joomfish 2.0 - this is not an exhaustive list but should give you a flavour.

•  Joomfish 2.0 has been written so that it can translate both Joomla 1.5 native and legacy components.
• A new plugin architecture. This allows for custom handling of missing translations and the creation of specialised modules such as locale aware menus etc.
• Translation of content that include <form> tags. This has caused problems in the past - since the translation page contains a form within a form which many web browsers, quite naturally, have problems with.
• There are now 2 system plugins.
  • "Joomfish - Basic Router" - this handles the language switching so should always be the first plugin in the list of system plugins.  Other 3rd party SEF plugins are likely to perform this function in the future in which case you would disable this plugin.
  • "Joomfish - Abstraction Layer" - this handles the database connections and takes delivers the requests for translation.  This plugin should always be the first plugin after the "Joomfish - Basic Router".
• SEF based language switching can be based on language specific subdomain or by adding a customisable language. This is configured using the "Joomfish - Basic Router".
• And special features just for subscribers / supports ... read on

I have reworked some of the underlying logic of how Joomfish 2.0 retrieves translations in such a way as to achieve a major performance boost.  This short article explains how to get the most out of Joomfish 2.0.

Performance Gains Explained

Joomfish 2.0 features:

• A translation cache - unless the translations have been changed Joomfish will now cache its results with a significant gain in performance.
• Taking advantage of features in the mysqli database driver where available.
• The language switching module safely caches the URLs obtained from the router.
• Where sites are unable to use the mysqli database driver we have speeded up on one of the bottlenecks in Joomfish.  This is the analysis of database queries by a function called "setRefTables". The results of this analysis is now cached by default.

Getting the best performance from Joomfish 2.0

• Make sure you use mysqli as a database adapter (this requires PHP5 and mysql 4.1.1) - Joomfish takes advantage of features of mysqli which makes it FAR faster than the old mysql version. You can set this in the global configuration - server tab.
• If you can't use mysqli then enable "query analysis caching" in the Joomfish parameters. Do NOT enable the query analysis logging.
• Make sure you enable translation caching in the Joomfish parameters - via the paramaters toolbar button in the Joomfish control panel (the default is off).
  
• The translation cache is maintained on a language by language basis and when a new translation is saved in the backend the relevant cache is cleared. Frontend translations do not currently clear the cache.

The Joomfish caching algorithms only cache the translations and so if the original changes or you modify a translation then the cache is not used and a fresh copy is retrieved.  You can therefore use the Joomfish caching even if you don't enable Joomla caching.

However, to get the most out of Joomfish you should enable caching in Joomla itself - you will see a significant improvement in your site performance!