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.

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

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. 

Vor dem Hintergrund eines deutschen Artikels in der aktuellen Ausgabe des PHPmagazin auch eine deutsche Information auf unserer Seite. Unter dem Titel "Sprachenwunder" wird das Projekt Joom!Fish und der Umgang mit mehrsprachigen Webseiten umfangreich beschrieben.

Der Leser bekommt eine kurze Einführung in die Installation, Grundkonfiguration und die ersten Übersetzungen mit Joomla und der Erweiterung Joom!Fish. Nach der Lektüre des Artiekls sollten die ersten Fragen eigentlich beantwortet sein. Wenn nicht, dann können Sie diese auch gerne in deutscher Sprache in unserem Forum stellen.

Auch im Rahmen das in kürze erscheinenden Joomla! Entwicklerhandbuchs wird die Erweiterung Joom!Fish in Beispielen genutzt und einige Details besprochen. Hier geht es aber weniger um die Anwendung und Nutzung als um spezielle Konzepte innerhalb der Entwicklung. Wir zeigen z.B. den Aufbau unserer ersten PHPUnit Tests und andere besondere Konzepte aus dem Bereich des MVC Entwurfsmusters.

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.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 2.0.3 of Joom!Fish.  This release resolves various reported bugs since the stable version and various improvements.

• Workaround for installer bug in Joomla 1.5.10
• Enable translation of menu aliases
• Option to hide default language in drop down when translating
• Checks on database collation capability before creating tables
• Fixed problems when deleting orphan translations and deleting languages
• New Georgian flag

In the past weeks several people have been pushing me to help them with their virtuemart sites and make them multi-lingual. And yes we achieved it. There are some pitfalls which are related to the way how information is created, stored and used within virtuemart but in general it works.

One thing that I found quite helpful was the usage of the direct translation module that is included in the Joom!Fish package. Never heared of it? May be you have seen the little Joom!Fish logo next to your status bar and wondered why it only tells you about the current default language. This is the default setting if you use a component the module does not know. But actually you are able to teach your direct translation module to work together with any component of Joomla.

For virtuemart we added the possibility to directly translate the products in the virtuemart product list. To achieve this go to your module manager and get your Direct Translation module properties (this is an administrator module ). In the parameter section you find several lines with config values. Just add the following code to one of those lines.

com_virtuemart#vm_product#product_id#page#product.product_list

This additional configuration will allow the direct translation module to identify which product you want to translate. It opens a modal window in which you can process your complete translation.

Beside that we have come accors some more smaller issues. E.g. the attributes for products are stored within the product itself and if you want to translate them you must translate them for all your products manually. This is kinda exhausting as there are reference tables but you can not easily update all your products with the correct names. The topic here is that this is not a translation issue but related to the way virtuemart stores the information. I can understand why this is done. On the other side I have some ideas how we can get around these issues and what we can improve. Anyhow for now I will work on a new package of the virtuemart content element files and include some more additional filters and other additional options. This should make the work with virtuemart more easy. Last but not least I will write a documentation about it and hopefully get this published in our new documentation section for Joom!Fish 2.0 topics.

We had great talks with folks during the Joomla!Day UK 2009. There was an open session that discussed multilingual websites and the need those sites had. Some very interesting ideas and concepts had been discussed during this session. Beside this session the Joomla!Day in Maidstone, Kent was a really positive experience and we had great time to talk and discuss with people. Most of the sessions had been with a high participation of the attendees and several sessions have been less presenting and far more discussing about ideas, concepts and solutions around Joomla!.

During the free time of the event we worked a little on the Joom!Fish 2.1 release which will be the next version. With this release we will focus on some minor things we have already on the lists for a while and of course the feedback we get in our feedback site. I'll check in the first set of unit-tests within the next days and also include a little add on to the general configuration of the extension. This new config value will allow you to suppress the default language in your selection lists of the administrator. This feature is designed to reduce the confusion why you can translate in your "default" language. For more experienced users you can switch it on again.

The other work I started in a branch is the feature idea about the new translation edit dialog. Various ideas how to solve this run through my mind. In fact I figured out that we can do this already today, even so it is not quite handy to use. But it makes it more easy for me in terms of development. More news coming up.