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Christine Chapman

Password Control 0.1.7 released

Password Control Icon

Password Control system plugin release 0.1.7 for Joomla 3.4 and 3.5.

This update corrects the display of the deprecated constructor method message seem when PHP 7 is used upon a site.

The install file is available in the download area.

Tags:
joomla updates Tools Plugin Password Control
Christine Chapman

Joomla 3.5.0. released

joomlaThe Joomla! Project and the Production Leadership Team are proud to announce the release of Joomla! 3.5.0.

Introducing 34 new features, including support for the recently released PHP 7 scripting language, which significantly increases web site speed.

This version of Joomla! supports the most recent release of PHP, the most popular programming language for developing web applications. PHP 7 was recently announced with significant performance improvements and is now available for use by the general public. With Joomla! 3.5 users can now enjoy the benefit of that performance improvement.

Joomla's new email update notification plugin periodically checks for available Joomla! updates and bug fixes, then emails administrators to notify them. 3.5's new statistics collection plug-in gathers the system environment in use. The raw data collected is anonymised before transmission and access to the compiled data is publicly available at https://developer.joomla.org/about/stats.html.

To have a full list of the features please visit our GitHub Repository.

Official release details are located here.

Tags:
updates level security issues 3. x series security release Production Leadership Team joomla security
Christine Chapman

IP Mapping 1.4.0 released

location-48IP Mapping release 1.4.0 available.

The Joomla component came from a requirement to display IP addresses of site visitors upon Google maps.

This minor update corrects a minor problem but was mainly intended to prepare for Joomla 3.5 and the character set utf8mb4.

See the changelog for details.

The release is available in the usual download location on our site.

Tags:
joomla updates IP Mapping
Christine Chapman

Password Control 0.1.6 released

Password Control Icon

Password Control system plugin release 0.1.6 for Joomla 3.4.

This update adds the password checks to the User password rest form when the user has 'forgotten' their password.  It also updates the copyright date to 2016 and changes the 'once date' criteria to be a calendar form field.

The install file is available in the download area.

Tags:
Password Control Plugin Tools updates joomla
Christine Chapman

Joomla 3.4.8 released

joomlaThe Joomla! Project and the Production Leadership Team are proud to announce the release of Joomla! 3.4.8.

This is a bug fix release for the 3.x series of Joomla This release fixes some bugs related to session management from Joomla 3.4.7. The project understands that many of our users are now on Christmas Holiday's so we would like to emphasise that this release only contains bug fixes and whilst we strongly encourage our users to update as soon as practically possible, this update can be left until after any holidays.

What's in 3.4.8

Joomla 3.4.8 fixes some issues found in the 3.4.7 release on Monday to do with browser sessions. All reported bugs from the 3.4.7 update have been fixed in this release:

For known issues with the 3.4.8 release, see the Version 3.4.8 FAQ in the documentation site.. Please note that it is expected that you will be logged out as soon as the update is complete.

Official release details are located here.

Tags:
security joomla Production Leadership Team security release 3. x series level security issues updates
Geoffrey Chapman

Issue Tracker: Handling received emailed issue updates

issues-48Our Issue Tracker component for Joomla has long had the ability (when configured) to handle ‘issues’ sent to a predetermined email address upon a mail server, and to automatically create issues. What is not quite so well known is its ability to handle updates to existing issues via received emails as well.

Certain criteria have to be established to ensure that the ‘update email’ relates to an existing reported issue.  There are several steps to this.

a) When an issue creation notification is send out the sent email contains a couple of ‘special’ mail header tags.  When an update email is received the presence (or absence) of these mail header tags are checked, and provide one level of confirmation that the ‘email update’ is for an existing issue.

b) The email title is also checked for the existence of a special format string.  The format of this string is usually [Issue: xxxxxxxxxx] or just [xxxxxxxxxx], where xxxxxxxxxx is the issue number. It is possible to have different formats for the issue number which may be a ‘random’ ten character string, or a nine digit number preceded by zeros and a leading character (again ten characters in total), or a numeric string consisting of up to 10 digits.

[Release 1.6.8 of Issue Tracker enables a slightly more relaxed format string in that any character string may precede the issue number. The square braces are required in all cases.]

We can assist in the issue number detection by specifying one of the above issue format strings in the outgoing message notification. This is a component configuration and the format of message header and message body contents is possible for all outgoing message types.

c) The email senders address is also checked to see whether it matches the email address of the person who first raised the issue report.

If the criteria is not met then the email update is rejected.  If however the email is identified as being an update for an existing issue, then the handling of the email body has to be looked at.  A number of email clients (all?) such as Outlook, Thunderbird etc. (to name just a couple) permit ‘reply’ emails to incorporate the received email text in the outgoing message either preceding or following the ‘new’ message text. This is potentially annoying in that if the body text was taken as it is received, the message would contain unrequired information, which is already present in the issue ‘record’. We therefore seek to eliminate the ‘former unrequired included text’ from the message before saving the data in the issue record.

The easiest way to be specify a special ‘text string’ which is searched for in the message body and any text seen after this ‘string’ is silently ignored.  This works well in practise but only if the ‘string’ is present in the message.  If it is not present one is left with a decision as to whether to accept the whole message, ‘included former messages text’ or just reject the message entirely.  This is obviously a decision that a configuration option permits a site to make.

It is not possible to know whether the client browser, is going to include the ‘former message text’ either before or after the ‘new’ message content,and there is no standard way for a client to indicate the present of this ‘former’ text in the message.  Fortunately the most common default is for the ‘former message’ to be included after the ‘new message text’. In this situation we can try and eliminate most of this text automatically.  To do this we need to ensure that the outgoing message contains our ‘'special reply text string”. We can accomplish this by the use of a ‘hidden’ HTML tag at the start of the outgoing message as follows:

#-#- Text following text is ignored –#-#

 [The ‘#-#-‘ string (and its derived inverse) is a component setting and can be any desired unique string that is unlikely to be provided by the user in the usual course of business.]

We add this to the email template body and it has the advantage that it will not be displayed in the message due to the span style which hides the text. If the user replies and includes the received message contents in their reply it would be picked up by the message body checking code and can then be eliminated from the message stored in the component issue.

This will not of course eliminate all unnecessary text from the ‘email update message’ but it can go a long way towards reducing it. 

Tags:
Issue Tracker Email updates joomla
Christine Chapman

IP Mapping 1.3.2 released

location-48IP Mapping release 1.3.2 available.

The Joomla component came from a requirement to display IP addresses of site visitors upon Google maps.
This release required a Joomla version 3.3 or above to function. Earlier versions are not supported. The release adds an option to use HTML5 geo-location determination to store the visitors location data. The browser itself, if it supports HTML5 geo-location controls the whether the user permits or declines to share their location data. If the user declines then the normal IP location determination mechanism is used.

This minor update corrects a few minor problems with the earlier 1.3.1 release.  Tested upon Joomla 3.4.3.

See the changelog for details.

The release is available in the usual download location on our site.

Tags:
IP Mapping updates joomla
Geoffrey Chapman

Farewell to XMAP, Hello OSMAP

We have used the XMAP component for some time and were a little surprised when we discovered that this excellent component was no longer being supported, but not totally surprised since the last update was quite a while ago, but it performed well and did what it was intended to.  We had noticed that it had ceased working with EasyBlog but this was not a major concern (for us at least.)

We were therefore please when we discovered that OS Training (Alledia) were assuming the task of enhancing it.  We duly downloaded the 'new' OSMAP component and installed it and it worked flawlessly almost straight away.  A minor change to the Google Web Site and we were soon working again.

What was nice was that the EasyBlog XMAP plugin worked perfectly with the new version.  The only problem we discovered was when we tried to add the Kunena entries to our site map.  The entries were added to the site map but unfortunately when one clicked upon them the forum entries gave an 'access prohibited' message. The cause was because appended to each entry was '/list'.  Removal of the erroneous string and the link worked perfectly.  Fortunately we found this post in the Kunena forum which provided an alternative plugin which when installed resolved the link problem.

 

Tags:
updates Kunena joomla
Christine Chapman

Joomla 2.5.28 released


joomlaThe Joomla! Project and the Production Leadership Team have announced the release of Joomla! 2.5.28.

This is a maintenance release for the 2.5 series of Joomla! and is the final scheduled release of the series. Support for Joomla! 2.5 is scheduled to end on December 31, 2014.

What does this mean for me?

End of support refers to when Joomla! no longer provides bug fixes, features, or security updates for a release. This is the time to make sure you have the latest available update of Joomla. Your website will continue to work as normal.

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Tags:
joomla updates Web Server
Christine Chapman

Web Site Revamp

We are pleased to announce the revamp of our web site.

We have retaining all of our previous content which is now presented in a template designed by Joostrap making use of Bootstrap v3.

This redesign is intended to reflect some of the newer emerging technologies and also increased performance and a more streamlined design. It is fully responsive and mobile ready, using HTML5 as standard.

This is the first of a number of changes we will be making on the site which will be made over the next month or so. Our previous template has served us well for a while but all things have their time and it was time to move with the times.

Update 25/06/2014: Have also upgraded the version of Joomla to the latest release. Hopefully everything will remain stable.

Tags:
joomla Template website updates
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