Hi friends,

after being away for a while, traveling around Europe and Bulgaria, now I am back here on the forums and will try to review all outstanding issues around. We are aiming for a stable version, but there are also some other interesting news that we would like to share.

First of all, Joom!Fish core team members will be attending the Joomladays in Switzerland and Sweden on 15 November. You can meet with Alex in Sweden, and with me in Switzerland. We are very excited about it and will try to present the opportunities with Joom!Fish and some of our ideas and future plans.

I am personally very happy that will meet with some of the most important people in the Joomlasphere like Wilco (core team member), Yannick (sh404sef), Soeren (Virtuemart) and Beat (Community Builder).

We are also considering some surprises for the attendands there.

Of course that is not all. However, not everything will come right now, stay tuned in our web site in order to understand our plans for the near future.

It's been 2 weeks since we released the Joom!Fish 2.0 RC in public. On our default download location more than 10.000 downloads have been provided since. The feedback we get is pretty cool and already several sites use the system in a pre productive phase.

What is even more positive is the fact that we have less than 10 bugs reported. Most of the issues are related to the caching system of Joomla! that still has some general issues which are reported for Joomla! 1.5 as well. In order to take care of these issues we decided to integrate a new logic caching the translations in the database and not in the file system. Most of the other issues are easily fixed.

Saying so, we are very close to the stable version of Joom!Fish and we expect the release in time. The preparation phase for the Club Members will start soon and short after we will release the stable version to the public. We like to thank all our users, contributors and donors for the help and confidence in the project.

Dear friends of the Joom!Fish project,
It is our pleasure to announce the immediate availability of the public release of Joom!Fish 2.0 Release Candidate. A big thank goes to everyone interested in the project, from contributors, supporters, end users, third party developers and of course our families and friends for their patience when we were giving our time to the project.

Joom!Fish 2.0 is the full featured release of Joomla's free multilingual extension. It is considered stable for productive use after a long phase of Beta testing. All features are implemented and depending on the community feedback we will look forward releasing the stable version soon.

We would like to announce that all one month (20 EUR) subscriptions made before 10 August 2008 will expire on 10 September 2008.

Why?

Well, because this was basically the deal - one month access to the pre-releases, documentation and support. When we launched the Joom!Fish Club on 1 July, we granted access to our donors from the begging of the year to the Club, based on their donation till the moment. After that we clearly stated what the benefits for each level of subscription are. We had some initial idea that the RC version at that time was close, but it took us extra time in order to polish it and make it quite stable. Therefore, we decided that it would be fair for our one month subscribers to have access to its pre-release (although they had access to the interim builds during that period). If we add that the documentation was not really up to date, we thought this would make them happy. Now, on 9 September, we will publish the RC to public and based on our subscription plans, the access of the expired subscribers will expire as well. The renewal process is as easy as the joining part, just go to our subscription page and choose your new subscription period, than enter your forum username and site username (both should be the same).

Just one day left till we publish the RC version for everyone and we hope that as till the moment no major bugs will be found by the community. It is nice to see that the list of translations of Joom!Fish available increases and we have 16 translations till the moment. If you can’t find translation into your language in our downloads section or you don’t see it as started in the forum thread, you can easily gain contributor status by preparing a translation.

What is more important to come is an announcement related to PHP4 and how Joom!Fish works with it. Version 2.0 was developed and tested in PHP5, however we attempted to use code that is backwards compatible with PHP4. Users should note that following the withdrawal of support for PHP4 by the developers of PHP (see here) we can only provide support for PHP5 installations. The next version of Joom!Fish – 2.1 will be written for PHP5 only. If your hosting provider still uses PHP4, we recommend you to contact them and to ask for an upgrade. There are many discussions over internet why should PHP4 rest in peace and we are not going to explain it once again here. Just keep in mind that your web site will be faster and more secure if you use the latest technologies available.

It is a time, when we try to gather inputs from the end users, fix these issues and go for a stable release.

Now we noted several bugs in the RC, which we summarized in the tracker and hopefully we will fix these soon. Except of one (which appears to certain systems only), none of the remaining bugs found till the moment is major.

It is our first day, after the RC version was made available as a package to the donors (and through the SVN for anyone) and the really good news is that there was no single bug confirmed in this day. All the issues reported were mainly related to the incompleted documentation so far (however, today we uploaded an updated PDF, prety close to the final one) or related to the deletion of cache.

I just uploaded the first language packs received. You can find these in our downloads section. Thanks to Yannis Karampelas from Netstudio in Greece, Ilija Iliev from Macedonia (please do not involve us in political issues about the name), Christophe Vouaux from France and Müfit Kiper (Swedish) from Kiper IT-konsult.

To be honest, we are very pleased that the translators involved are mainly company owners/representatives. It seems that Joom!Fish is attracting more and more the corporate business.

We are waiting for the translations in Dutch and Italian. If you want to translate Joom!Fish and gain contributor level in our web site, contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The Joom!Fish team likes to announce the availibility of the Release Candidate Joom!Fish 2.0 for all Club members starting from today. We will provide the package including dedicated support and installation help for all Club members. For everybody else the package is available in the SVN trunk. Starting 9th of September 2008 we will provide the RC package for the public including support in our forums.

With this package we have completed the full set of features and required integration for all Joom!Fish core components, modules and plugins. The status of the package is considered feature complete and so far pretty stable. As we implemented several new features within the last development cycle this release candidate is dedicated to do the final testing and offer all our supporters some time for the final translations, documentations and other required localisations.

The team is pretty confident that after a short peroid of the final testing the stable version from Joom!Fish 2.0 can be released as well. The current release already includes the feature to upgrade your work from the RC to a later stable version without a transition period. With Joom!Fish very close to be stable a quite long development phase ended. Joom!Fish now uses most of the new Joomla! framework architectures and it should be easy to be integrated in your sites. We are looking forward seeing your new sites soon and like to invite all of you writing about your projects within our forum.

After revision 1164, these of you who follow our SVN will note that all of the extensions that come with Joom!Fish now have language files. This revision also marks the end all known issues.

What we need is someone to translate these into their native languages. You can find the English package in our downloads section. You will note that there is also a XML file, that turns this package to be easy installable in Joomla!

I would like to remind all interested parties, that translators are considered as contributors and will gain access to our club forums and downloads.

Anyone, who completes a translation, could send it to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .