Well its Friday 13th and on-time we are pleased to announce the first ever preview of the upcoming Joomla Tags Extension for Joomla. (Don’t worry - you soon will be able to download the real thing!)

We have put online a demo site that allow you to login and play with the new framework. Take a look specifically at these things:

• The ability to create and assign different layouts to each tag
• The ability to tag items on the front end with no page refresh
• View the new Tag Cloud - with its dynamic interface
• See one of the two new modules for Tags
• See the new tab in the Edit content screen, with its new functionality to search for tags to add
• Take a look at the frontend content editing screen - you can now add tags from there too!
• Fully xHTML valid on the frontend.
• See the new maintenance screen - full of tasks to make life easier

We are still working out a few niggles with the framework over the weekend before we release files to the public. This are minor really.

• We need to test the migration from Tags Component
• We need to complete the language support
• The Object caching needs tweaking for performance
• The installation of the component needs to be completed.
• The unpopular step of ionCube encoding the license file needs to be automated
• Review of UTF/Special Chars integration (Almost done!)
• a few other things…

We invite you to provide feedback TODAY and all weekend in the new dedicated forum at

http://forum.phil-taylor.com/index.php/board,16.0.html

Remember that all the frontend screens can be configured by the new Layout Manager - you have complete control over what the frontend looks like - we have not yet put much effort into the template layouts so do not be put off by them at the moment - when you click a tag it doesnt have to show the title only - it can and will show a lot more once we sort out the new default layouts.

We now invite you into our demo site. The Administrator usernames are admin, admin1, admin2, admin3, admin4, and admin5. The password for all these accounts in “admin”. If you get session expired messages then maybe someone else is also using the same admin user, try another one or create yourself a new admin account.

The demo is refreshed every hour!! All new users will be deleted then.

The URL of the Joomla Tags Public Preview is:

http://www.joomla-tags.com/demo/joomla1.0.12

(Dont forget - to login to the administrator console and select Joomla Tags from the components menu to see a fantastic new framework in operation!)

(The Joomla 1.5 Demo will be available soon too…)

PLEASE LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK !!!

If not then you are at risk from hackers! Make sure that you take time
out TODAY to upgrade your Joomla website to the latest version.

If you would like us to upgrade your website for you (For a small fee)
then please visit

http://www.phil-taylor.com/FixMySite/

We have been concerned for some time with the amount of complaints about emails not being sent from Phil-A-Form forms. 99% of the time the problem has been traced to something other than Phil-A-Form but because PAF used Joomla’s built in Mail Sending system no debugging information was possible without manually modifying joomla.php by Blue Flame in order to get real error messages.

Phil-a-Form v1.6 has now been released to address this concern!

Well now in Phil-A-Form v1.6 we have implemented our own Mail sending system in Full debug mode. As long as your Joomla Global Mail Configuration options are set correctly then there should be no reason for your emails not to be sent - however should there be an error the new version of Phil-A-Form v1.6 will display a lot of debug information (and more on demand!) to aid you in configuring your site correctly.

We have also taken advantage to fix a lot of smaller issues including 2 security XSS issues brought to our attention, for that reason we would strongly encourage all users to upgrade to the latest Joomla 1.0.12 and Phil-A-Form v1.6

Upgrading

Upgrading is dead simple, just uninstall your current version of Phil-a-form and then install this one just as you would a new component - all your forms, data and submissions will be saved and not lost ! Perfect!

We have also opened a sub-forum specifically for Phil-A-Form Email Solutions, please post any reports in that forum.

P.s. We have also introduced a new basic “Uploaded File Manager” in this version to help you manage any uploaded files your form creates…

It has been reported to us twice over Christmas that a certain backup and restore component for Joomla is “cloning” Joomla databases without reinstating all the properties of the databases’ primary keys correctly.

You will know when you have this problem as you will not be able to add any NEW content to your Joomla site and you may get error messages about duplicate primary keys.

If you take a look at your jos_content table, check the ID field and see if auto_increment is a property of the field - if not then you have lost all your auto_increments.

I have compiled a short list of SQL commands to reinstate the correct primary keys and properties based on joomla.sql, the default joomla installation SQL. This will NOT fix 3rd party components tables which must be done manually.

The following SQL Commands are applicable to Joomla 1.0.x only. Read the rest of this entry »