JoomlaWorks

JoomlaWorks will be 10 in a few months, just a little older than Joomla itself.

In these 10 years we have managed to create some of the most respected and of course popular extensions in the Joomla community. Extensions like K2, AllVideos, Simple Image Gallery (Free and Pro) or Tabs & Sliders, all with more than one million downloads each. At the same time, we have developed more than 30 extensions for Joomla (both free and commercial), all with a combined download count of nearly 8 million.

As we progress into the future, building new & more complex products, while embracing new platforms (WordPress in particular), we must be laser focused on the products that matter most to our vision. And our vision is to offer solid, cross-platform products with a long lifespan, that redefine how we develop websites with Joomla and eventually WordPress. That way you can invest in them and know that they will be supported and improved continuously.

So as we move towards more such complex products, we (unfortunately) have to cut down on the resources we spend on extensions that are less important to us, as we really don't wish to become "Jack of all trades, master of none".

Our goal is to maintain a portfolio of less than 10 products for Joomla and (eventually) WordPress. Less products means we can be more agile when it comes to developing new features in the future.

In the recent update of K2 v2.7.0 we decided to decouple any built-in integration with third party extensions for 2 important reasons: easier maintenance of third party features and faster updates.

K2 is built as a solid component and we don't plan on releasing updates every couple of weeks. To give you an idea of how solid K2 is, the previous version (2.6.9) was released in December 2014 and it was 100% compatible with Joomla 3.4.x up until the launch of K2 v2.7.0. A slower release cycle means we are more careful when we issue updates to K2 and this is something we believe firmly.

That being said, if we want to properly support third party extension integration with K2, it's best to decouple any such functionality. It's what we did since the inception of K2 in 2009 when we decided to keep the advanced media and image gallery functionalities completely separate in the form of AllVideos and Simple Image Gallery Pro.

After so many years, one thing has also proved certain: the continuous support of sh404SEF from Anything Digital and recently from Weeblr (founded by sh404SEF's original developer, Yannick Gaultier). sh404SEF is one of the most popular extensions in the Joomla community and it's arguably the best SEO related extension for Joomla.

So seeing sh404SEF continuously being updated and improved, we decided to decouple it from K2 in order to follow such changes in sh404SEF's development. As a bonus we also added community requested features for even better URL manipulation and finally we made sure the plugin supports both K2 versions 2.x and the upcoming 3.x. That's one codebase to maintain and from now on it will fall to faster updates, following closely the development of sh404SEF.

The new "K2 Plugin for sh404SEF" is distributed commercially for two reasons: we can provide dedicated/personal support and it's a way to give back to the K2 project.

"K2 Plugin for sh404SEF" is now available to purchase in 6 and 12 month subscriptions, starting from 14.90 EUR.

What a blast, both my first overseas trip and my fist international conference as well. This huge opportunity was not to be wasted.

As you may have noticed the past few weeks, we have unpublished the product pages for K2mart and SuperBlogger. As it occurs with every other product or technology, there is a time when we have to say goodbye, either because a new better product or technology fulfills our needs or simply because it's not required anymore.

A common pitfall you might have run into is publishing or hiding modules in views that do not use a specific menu item. In this blog post we are shedding some light into K2 search results and how to extend their functionality. We will assign a menu item to the K2 search results so we can have even more control over our modules.

F-i-n-a-l-l-y! Goodbye, adieu, sayonara, άντε γεια & good riddance to Joomla LTS releases!

The Joomla team has decided to ditch the Ubuntu style release cycle (a truly WTF decision in the first place) and once and for all end confusion to developers, users, customers and clients from hell.

This means that the current release (3.x) is the current stable release. There is NO need to use Joomla 2.5 anymore. It won't be more stable compared to Joomla 3.x. And when 4.x is released, that will be the new stable release and so on.

An exception will be made for Joomla 2.5 and it will be supported until the end of 2014. Joomla development will then shift entirely to Joomla 3.x.