Away for a few days – returning home.
As you by now must be aware, we moved recently to the Channel Islands. well this weekend we are returning to sunny England for a long weekend – therefore email replies will be delayed and the forums unmanned!
EMERGENCIES ONLY Please call 07740188284 – we will still have limited internet access so may not be able to assist.
Joomla Tags FAQ
Q. What’s the difference between this new “Joomla Tags” and the existing “Tags Component” ?
A. Well the “Tags component” was released in March 2006 and was compatible with Joomla 1.0.x only. “Joomla Tags” is a brand new component that happens to do the same thing – but with much more powerful features! “Joomla Tags” has been written from scratch on the Blue Flame Framework (bfFramework – A 100% Ajax Admin framework with a MVC Programming interface which allows us to rapidly develop Applications for Joomla. bfFramework applications such as “Joomla Tags” will work with the xAJAX Plugin for Joomla to provide a
solution for both Joomla 1.0.12 AND Joomla 1.5 without ANY changes to the component! That’s Truly Amazing! ).
Q. What happens to my”Tags Component”?
A. Well you can continue to run this component on your site, or if you purchased after 1st November 2006 you are entitled to a free copy of
“Joomla Tags” as per our published policy. The two components have VERY different database tables but we have aimed to make migration
of data as simple as possible.
Q. So everyone who bought “Tags component” can get a free copy of “Joomla Tags”?
A. No. We have stated our policy clearly. Inline with all our public policies on our website there is no automatic entitlement that requires
us to give free copies of this new application to customers who have purchased the older “Tags component”
Q. What about Lifetime Upgrades – haven’t I been mislead.
A. Not at all. Our policy for lifetime upgrades does not conflict here. “Tags component” and “Joomla Tags” are two totally different Joomla components with different code and different features. Both will be further developed, in the case of the “Tags Component” only security and bug fixes will be applied.
Q. Can I upgrade from “Tags Component” to “Joomla Tags”?
A. There is not an upgrade – but a migration. We will publish full details once they are finalised, but it should be very easy and
probably automated 
Q. What happens when you release “Joomla Forms”? Will that replace Phil-a-form?
A. The same policies stated above will all still apply. Phil-a-form will still be developed and Phil-a-form customers have no automatic entitlement to a free copy of “Joomla Forms”. We have made this perfectly clear in our communication for over a year now.
Q. What other Joomla Components are you releasing on the bfFramework?
A. We would not like to tell you all of them for commercial reasons.
However we have already committed to the following Joomla
Extensions that will work in both Joomla 1.0.12 and Joomla 1.5
What kind of support can you expect after purchasing?
Last year I wrote a note about how we provide support for our customers after they have purchased, I am repeating that post now as I find that it is important to make the distinction between After Sales Support for a product you purchased, and demanding time from an over worked developer for free for your specific “want”.
This note is written as a clarification. I’m not angry just need to let people know what is acceptable Aftersales support and whats not.
When you purchase a product you obviously assume that you will get a certain level of support and assistance for the product you purchase – that is right and proper. However, there is a line between what is aftersales support and what is not support. There is a difference between what is expected and what is blatantly custom development or excessive handholding. Our components are very mature and have been installed on over 8000 servers worldwide – we have total confidence in them and we are dedicated to ensuring you get the best out of them.
Or read it in the FAQ where it has been for some time…
Special Chars in our xAJAX Components
As you may be aware we have been investigating why, under certain environments, non-latin based chars do not display correctly on websites when using our xAJAX based components such as Tags or mosKB.
xAJAX uses UTF-8 so we know it was not an issue with xXAJAX. Joomla 1.0.11 is not too UTF-8 friendly and even the Joomla Developers have blogged about the difficulties in acheiving true UTF-8 on a site.
After many weeks testing under different environments we are pleased to offer some more thoughts so that, if you are experiencing issues with the chars not displaying correctly, you can attempt these changes to your site to ensure the best compatibility. These changes have fixed every site we have personally seen that had problems so we hope that one of them will fix your site if you are having issues.
Credits and Thanks to the some great webpages
Read on tosee ways you can help yourself…
Clarification of Our Joomla Office Working Hours
We wanted to write again to clarify our working times as some people still expect us to work 24 hours a day 7 days a week!
We are a United Kingdom Based Limited Company, Our local time can be found by following this link.
We have 4 staff, all of which are contracted to work on UK Office Time, that being 9am to 5:30pm Monday to Friday ONLY!
We do NOT reply to emails on weekends.
We do NOT reply to emails in the evenings.
We do NOT do Drop Everything requests outside of working hours, unless contacted by telephone and when it is a good time for us.
There was a point before I was married, before my wife was pregnant and before we had additional staff where I would work all hours of the day and night to support customers demands – this is no longer the case!
The times when we do overtime in the evening or weekend we use the time to write code for our components or fix bugs. As I sit here on the sofa on Sunday afternoon I am working hard on testing Phil-A-Form v1.5 and mosKB new release to come next week.
Our New Support Forum Revealed
We are happy to announce that we are taking a different approach to support after many months struggling with the email situation. Visit our new support forums!
We have taken the decision to support our customers in an open forum and only to engage in email correspondence when really needed (Like when sending passwords or site details). This should enable us to faster meet the demands of supporting our 8 components and over 8000 customers.
We are also in negotiation with an outsourcing Support Company and several individuals who may join our support team in the near future.
The Support Forums should now be the primary place to visit to find answers to your support queries and to ask questions. We will do our best to reply to forum posts ad encourage our customers to help each other to. If you really must email us then please direct your questions to support@phil-taylor.com. We encourage all customers to participate in the support forums as this will help build a repository of knowledge quicker. We will pull all helpful threads into our Knowledgebase so they can be found easily too.
We have also migrated from phpBB to SMF Forum – this aids us in administration. You dont need to re-register as we have migrated your user accounts across.
Thanks to Jason for some other ideas that we will implement soon – ideas like “cash for questions”- more details soon!
Moving forward we have some great things lined up – stay tuned !
xAJAX Based Components – Component Compatibility Statement
We have just updated our Component Compatibility Statement to include up to date information. Here are snippets:
We are working hard on a FREE project at http://www.xajax-joomla.com which will provide the platform for all our xAJAX Based Components in the near future
Our Components that use xAJAX are:
- Tag/Tags (Updated to use the xAJAX for Joomla Plugin)
- mosKnowledgebase (Update due soon!)
At the time of writing (and until this page is updated again) you CANNOT run these two components at the same time!
We are aware that there will be conflicts between components that use xAJAX and that is why we started the xAJAX for Joomla Plugin system which will allow more and more components to run xAJAX without conflict.
We will release a new version of mosKB soon to use xAJAX for Joomla Plugin.
Tags and jomComment
We are aware that jomComment (A Popular Comments Component) conflicts with Tags versions less than 0.9 and we have been working hard with the developer to develop the xAJAX for Joomla Plugin. If you are running jomComment then you need to run a version greater than jomComment 1.65 beta in order for it to work on the same site as Tags
mosKB and jomComment
mosKB has yet to be refactored to use the xAJAX for Joomla Plugin – it will be soon!
Tags and mosKB on the same site:
Will not work until mosKB is refactored (Dont’ be fooled by our site, we are not running the latest versions -yet!)
Joomla Developers Course – in SEPTEMBER not August
recently we sent an email to over 10,000 Joomla related customers with the incorrect date for the Joomla Developers course. Sorry
The correct date for the course is 16th and 17th September 2006
More details and to book visit http://www.phil-taylor.com/booknow
The difference between after-sales support and additional custom work or support
This note is written as a clarification. I’m not angry just need to let people know what is acceptable Aftersales support and whats not.
When you purchase a product you obviously assume that you will get a certain level of support and assistance for the product you purchase – that is right and proper. However, there is a line between what is aftersales support and what is not support. There is a difference between what is expected and what is blatantly custom development or excessive handholding. Our components are very mature and have been installed on over 8000 servers worldwide – we have total confidence in them and we are dedicated to ensuring you get the best out of them. Read the rest of this entry »
Joomla Components :: Support Forum – Joomla Components
Joomla Components :: Support Forum – Joomla Components
I am pleased to announce that we have launched the new support forum platform today, its still phpBB2 however I have modified the signup process so you need to use the email address that you use when you purchase to register.
The old forums (after a restore pre-spam bot attack) is now read only and available at http://forum.phil-taylor.com/old/ Please do not reply or post in these old forums as they will be removed in a few months – please use the new forums only.
You will need to RE-REGISTER at the new forums – we will not be migrating the old users.
Have fun!