It has been too long since we wrote a blog post. So here is one with information about what has been going on lately.

Matyas from Hungary has joined us as a PHP programmer about 4 months ago and he has slotted right and and is working on our new Real Estate component for Joomla as well as other client projects. Yes yes - I know a new real estate is really exiting, but you will have to wait for at least another 30-60 days. Matyas also developed the Joomla Component Creator which has been very popular. Welcome Matyas!

We have launched Automatic Backlinks which has been a huge success with almost 5000 members in 10 months. We expect to possibly reach 10,000 by the end of the year. The proof is in the pudding as they say and we have really created a fantastic system for getting your site ranked in search engines. Check it our if you have not already.

We have moved offices to a much bigger premise in the centre of town. For some reason people did not enjoy sitting on each others laps, so I guess the move was inevitable.

We have launched some new cool web sites:

http://www.meinweekend.ch (Swish travel agent - not our design)
http://www.passion4customers.com (Exiting new complaints portal in several languages - not our design)
http://www.grancanarialuxuryvillas.com (Holiday rental site - our design)
http://www.nerjaholidayrentals.com (Holiday rental site - our design)
http://www.learnpdrsecrets.com (Dent removal training site - our design)

And finally… we are working on a new version of this site - it is going to look super cool, but due to paid work taking priority it looks like it will be some time away.

Stay tuned!

Great news for all Joomla developers!

After developing a few custom components for our clients, we realized just how long and time-consuming it can be, just to create all the files necessary to make a new Joomla 1.5 component, following the MVC standards. Immediately, we realized that a lot of this process was very tedious and repetitive and could be automated if only somebody created some software that did this for the developer… and so we did!

We have created the Joomla Component Creator - which has already saved us hours of development time -  and decided to share it with you all.

The Joomla Component Creator creates all the files necessary; views, helpers, controller, etc. as well as creating all the necessary, appropriately named classes and also version, author and licensing information in the header comment of all the files.

We have already had lots of people trying this tool out for themselves and already a good amount of positive feedback. We hope you like it and it saves as much time for you as it has done for us! If you like it, we would appreciate your reviews.

One of the most tedious things about search is that you have to go back to the search result after viewing a matching page before you can go to the next matching page.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could click previous and next directly on the page of all the matching pages and thus browse through all the results without having to go back to the result page? Well - read on for the answer to how this is possible and so difficult to achieve.

Searching for real estate?
The above mentioned problem is especially obvious when searching for properties on a real estate web site or any other web site where it is unlikely that anyone result will be the “correct” match. On these sites it is a great feature to make it possible to browse the matching results from a search directly from the resulting pages.

Saving the query and not the result list
The problem facing developers is to make the results available in the correct order on the actual resulting (matching) pages. Initially you might think that the best option is to save a list of all the results in a long array and then look that up on the individual resulting pages, and that could be a way to do but not if you use pagination on your results pages.

Let us say that you have found 2000 matches - hopefully you will not show all 2000 results on one long page, but instead break the pages up with say 10 results per page (like Google). Now if you have done your SQL correctly you will have made a lookup with LIMIT in it so that SQL only returns a certain amount of results. This leaves us with the problem that we can not make an array with ALL the results in it - because they are simply not available.

Instead we should save the SQL QUERY and pass that on to the matching pages when viewed.

Using the query and the position of the result that was clicked on you can create your previous/next buttons on the details pages. It works really well and saves lots of time for the browser.

Example and what about Google?
You can see our implementation on http://www.livingstone-estate.com simply perform a search and view one of the results and then enjoy the page flipping.

I wonder how long it will be before someone creates this as a Firefox extension for Google? It would be great to be able to scroll the result without having to go back to Google? Wouldn’t it?

We recently developed a site where we are using the excellent Joomla component Mosets Tree (version 2.0.2). To generate SEF URLs for the site, we are using the sh404SEF component as JoomSEF doesn’t play as nice out of the box.

However, when using sh404SEF there are a couple of issues, most noticeably the fact that status alerts (such as the “Listing submitted successfully! or “Your review is pending approval.” messages that appear when the user submits/rates/reviews/etc. something in the directory) do not appear. This is obviously bad for the user as they don’t get any feedback on whatever action they have just performed.

Luckily, there is a way to fix this that’s not too complicated …

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