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 !!!

Further to our recent announcement we are excited to give a very first glimpse into the new Joomla Tags component.

We have uploaded a snapshot of our Ultimate Joomla Tags Extension to our live site (This one!)as we wanted you to see the new Tag Cloud formation. (Don’t worry about the look - we have yet to complete the CSS Styling - and anyway the new system allow you to have full control over the output using your own templates, using the smarty system)

What do you think?

(We are still aiming and on course for a closed beta this Friday! - Keep watching!)

Ok, we admit it, the current Tags component is becoming a right pain, so we are scrapping it!

Gasp!

Before you die of shock we want to announce that (sooner than planned!) we will be releasing a new version of the Tags Component on Friday 13th April 2007!

This will be our first totally rewritten component to be released with our new bfFramework (A framework that allows us to rapidly build Joomla Extensions) and sports a whole new admin interface powered 100% by xAJAX and jQuery.

Whats more, we are aiming that the same component (already works, but will be announced proper in a later public version) will work in BOTH Joomla 1.0.12 AND Joomla 1.5 (And we have even tested it in Drupal!!!).

In an exception to our current policy on new components - all previous Tags Component Customers can get a FREE copy of the next Tags component without extra charge. This is not a change in our policy, but rather it is easier for us to do this with tags, we also want to see how the new bfFramework performs - so feedback will be welcome.

We are drawing a line under our old style components, and in bringing the launch of the new tags component forward we are excited to see your reaction…

… more news on this as soon as I can get it to you …

Firstly thanks to the guys in this Forum thread, for their patience and reports.

We are sorry for the quality of the v0.9.4 build of the Tags component where additional debug code and issues were found in one of the files.  This was the result of an inaccurate SVN merge of files with our main SVN truck.

I am happy to announce that the release of v0.9.5 of the Tags Component is now available for download from http://www.phil-taylor.com/cc

This version fixes our mess, and also fixes the pagination and footer text as detailed in the forum thread linked above.

As we move to the new office please bear with us and continue to report any issues with this build in the Forums or bug tracker (For confirmed “bugs”)

Again, thanks for your patience.

For some time now customers have been requesting a certain new feature in the Tags component - The ability to link to pages that contain articles tagged with two or more tags by AND or OR. Well we listened and now we are happy to announce a new release of the Tags component with new features !!!

This new functionality allows you to search for articles that are tagged with the tag names suppled within a URL.

You can search for articles by two methods the and method and the or method.

The or method allows you to search for articles tagged with the tags x or y (x and y being tag names). The URL that is required for this search method to work will look something like this:

www.mywebsite.com/index.php?option=com_tag&tag=x|y

As you can see the two tag names are separated with a bar(|), make sure this bar is included in the URL else the results of the search will not be as expected.

The and search allows you to search for articles tagged with the tags x and y (x and y being tag names). The URL for the and search is the same as the or search but with one change the tag names are separated with a semicolon(;) thus the URL will look something like this.

www.mywebsite.com/index.php?option=com_tag&tag=x;y

Again make sure this semicolon is included in the URL else the results of the search will not be as expected.

Please note that it isn’t possible to mix the two searching methods together e.g. x;y|z as this will result in a negative result

(Thanks to Chris for doing this so quickly and Thanks to Conor for the sponsorship)

Thanks to all customers that have alerted us to the fact the you are currently unable to add tags via the tags admin pages. We have now concluded our investigation and have found the root cause - 2 lines of funny code.

We will be releasing a new version of Tags soon that addresses this, and a few other issues, however in the mean time if you have the knowledge and the need you can edit the following file
/components/com_tag/tag.class.php

and remove the code on lines 443 and 447 completely (The lines are similar in content and can be fully removed).

The problem was caused when some of our debug code for making Tags more friendly for non-english languages was released with the main release instead of being removed. Sorry for that…

UPDATE: We have now updated the package our customers download, we have not increased the version number though.

Existing customers can download from http://www.phil-taylor.com/cc

Existing customers can now download at http://www.phil-taylor.com/cc

I want to write this once and once only Tag/Tags v0.9 is the first release of our xAJAX components that requires and depends on my new project, the
xAJAX Plugin for Joomla.

The reason for this change was to allow other component developers to develop xAJAX applications without conflicting with our own components

In order to run Tag/Tags v0.9 you FIRST need to download and install the xAJAX Plugin For Joomla. You need to install it and make sure the xAJAX for Joomla Plugin/Mambot is PUBLISHED.

Then you can install Tag/Tags v0.9

Tag/Tags v0.9 Will be released within the next 24 hours!

To Upgrade from an earlier Tags/Tags version

To upgrade use the installation check menu item in the Tags component to remove all the patches, mambots and modules and then finally use Joomla Component Installer to remove the tags component completly! (This does not delete your tags or the links to content!!!)

Then install the xajax plugin (details above) and then install Tag/Tags v0.9 making sure to repatch your files and install the modules and mambots using the installation check screen inside the tags component.

This version heralds a huge change in the way components work with xAJAX and leads the way to better integration in the future.

Also! Tag/Tags v0.9 has FULL LANGUAGE SUPPORT! It contains a language file that you can change easily to translate the component Cool!

Tag/Tags v0.9 Will be released within the next 24 hours!

We are working today on several updates to our components that resolve issues caused by the upgrade to Joomla 1.0.11 and specifically turning off of register_globals and rg_emulation in Joomla.

We will release these new versions as soon as they are tested by our team.

We are working on Tags, Phil-a-form and mosIPN.