Joom!Fish 2.0 - Beta 2 public is available

[ivo.apostolov]

It is our pleasure to release for the public the second beta of Joom!Fish 2.0.
Discuss the announcement in our announcement discussions forum.

For donors and contributors, who used the pre-release of Beta2, be aware that there are some fixes in the public version posted here, so make sure you will upgrade your files.
We do not recommend using this version on live sites, as it is beta and is for testing purposes only.

The version comes with fixes of most of the known issues. Prior to report bugs, read that the following are KNOWN issues and are expected to be resolved.

List of the KNOWN issues:
- Statistics screen is not yet implemented.
- Copy translations from the original language to a translation doesn't works (in Manage translations). To be implemented in the next version.
- MySQL error on installation - happens very rarely on specific servers. The bug is currently under investigation. (fixed here - download there the fixed beta2 version if you experience problems)
- Orphan translations - deletion is impossible. Known bug, under investigation.

Please be aware that our practice is not provide support for beta versions. Forums for 2.0 here are open for identification of bugs and feature requests only.

It is expected that this version will be used by advanced users only, for testing purposes and debugging.

Installation:
1. Install each of the zips through the Joomla! 1.5.x (1.5.3 minimum is required) installer.
2. Publish the plugins and the modules
3. Configure the Joom!Fish Languages
4. Play with it
Detailed instructions for usage will be available with the Stable version. If you can not deal with the setup, we highly recommend you to wait till the stable version.

Upgrade:
Note: This concerns upgrade from prior 2.0 versions
No changes were made in the databases, so simple replacement of the files will work (except for the router plugin, where uninstall/install is required).
Another option is to uninstall of the old version and install the new one. All 3PD content elements will be lost in that way, so be sure that you have backup of these. All Joom!Fish settings will be lost in that way, so you will need to configure these again.
During the upgrade, whatever method you select the available translations will not be lost.

[Geraint]

Configuring Joomfish 2.0

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".

The following images gives an illustration of the configuration - note that you MUST SAVE YOUR CONFIG VALUES at least once. Just enabling the router plugin is not enough. You should also clear your Joomla cache after you change or save these parameters.

config.jpg (156.66 KiB) Viewed 32903 times

You can now have URLs like:

Code: Select all

http://en.mydomain.com, http://de.mydomain.com, http://fr.mydomain.com etc.

or

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http://www.mydomain.com/en/ , http://www.mydomain.com/de/ , http://www.mydomain.com/fr/

You don't have to stick to language short codes like "en", "de" or "fr" you can use almost any strings including a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and hyphens (i.e. "-").

Maximising Performance of Joomfish 2.0

I have reworked some of the underlying logic of how Joomfish 2.0 retrieves transltions 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 beta2 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) - 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 on)
• 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! In this scenario our tests suggest Joomfish will only add 7%-13% overhead to the underlying Joomla site - in other words a page that takes 0.15 seconds in Joomla will only take 0.165 seconds with Joomfish enabled too.

Geraint

p.s. If you are wondering what the "include JFRouter" option does in the plugin configuration this will activate one of the extra features that will be included in a special version of Joomfish 2.0 that will only be available to donors above a certain level. This will enable Urls to translate from

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http://www.mydomain.com/en/more-about-joomla/29-the-cms/45-an-article to http://www.mydomain.com/cy/mwy-am-jwmla/29-y-srhc/45-erthygl-cymraeg,
or from
http://en.mydomain.com/more-about-joomla/29-the-cms/45-an-article to http://cy.mydomain.com/mwy-am-jwmla/29-y-srhc/45-erthygl-cymraeg


[ivo.apostolov]

Just a note: There will be no "special" version of Joom!Fish, but extra plugins.

[Geraint]

I have started a thread of known issues in Joomfish 2.0 (viewtopic.php?f=28&p=5585#p5585) - please check there before posting any bug reports.

Geraint