the latest code from our svn, copy everything into a temporary file, rebuild the professional and standard edition and archive every single build. It is pretty neat (if I may say so myself) and saves us tons of time.

 

Good news is, I have just finish updating our build script. Our script now will also output, not only standard and professional edition, but also native installer for both Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5 . In the next release, you will be able to download the component file that match your Joomla installation. This allow much smoother installation without having to ever turned on the legacy mode. Yes, My Blog will receive similar treatment very soon.

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For the development team, the priority task at hand is probably getting our components fully Joomla 1.5 compatible. We have got Jom Comment to run on Joomla 1.5 RC4 but there are still some wrinkles to iron out. My Blog and Nice Talk is next on the list. Though this process will take time as we think it best to wait until Joomla 1.5 itself is stable.

As usual Mark is standing by to squash all bugs and soothe the savage Joomla beast with the clickity-clack of his keyboard and the melodic lines of his codes, coaxing our components ever closer to 1.5 compatibility.

We will also be looking at rolling out several new products to the Joomla community this new year. While actual details of the new component roll outs are still hush hush and confidential, I am allowed to say that we may be seeing a better way to put up forms and job listings on Joomla soon. Building a better mouse trap so to speak.

Newcomer Eddy Yanto is currently in the thick of the action, as the newest developer at Azrul.com. The first one of many more that we will be recruiting all through the year. Part and parcel of our planned expansion. As Wil Schroter is fond of saying ,"Go Big or Go Home". We have big plans for 2008! Though we do plan to still keep things cozy. Where are we heading? Well let's just say into another blue ocean.

This is what I will be spending most of my time on this first quarter, weeding out the wheat from the chaffs, screening applicants and looking for those few, those happy few, those band of developers that eat, sleep, drink and excrete verified codes. If you have what it takes to be the best or ARE the best do drop me your resume and a note on why we should hire you at hazlan@azrul.com.

Azrul has got himself a new toy this year. After the iphone from last year, Azrul is now all crazy about VPS and virtualization. He has cobbled together a web server and is experimenting with XEN VPS like some Dr. Frankenstein and his stitched up corpse. When he is not spearheading the development team's coding forays he can be found by the side of his newest toy.{mospagebreak}

Much to the chagrin of Meriza, who nevertheless is keeping busy with our many planned community and public relations activities. We are also looking at expanding our market outreach this year. So if there are any interested potential affiliates and partners, do give us a buzz. We would love to hear from you. We are looking for affiliates to market our products as well as partnerships with template producers, 3rd party components developers as well as hosting providers. Interested parties can contact me.

Speaking of community activities, we will be supporting the upcoming Joomla Day Melbourne 2008 where limited FREE COPIES of our standard edition components will be up for grabs. If you are organizing a Joomla Day do let me know and we will see what we can do to support and celebrate your Joomla day with you.

Well that is all thats up with 2008 for now. I hope this will be a good year for us here at Azrul.com as well as for all our friends, affiliates, partners and customers out there. Till later, I bid all a good day and a spectacular year ahead!

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1.5 compatibility! The king of kings for the day was the jubilant Mr. Azrul himself whose last minute spurt of creativity managed to secure the breakthrough that the whole team has been working towards for the last few days. Coding team newcomer Edwin who was plunged headlong into the compatibility project on his first day, had to be rushed to the pantry for an emergency coffee infusion as he nearly collapsed from the strenous nature of the ordeal. According to coding team veteran Mark, the Edwin debacle is a common sight amongst newer members of the team before they got used to the whirlwind pace and turbulent episodes at Azrul Studio. Meriza, the solitary rose amongst the thorns at the office was just glad this whole thing is over so that the coding team can finally go home to rest, shower and shave. Finally, she can call in housekeeping to take care of the mess that the office has become after days of office-camping by the coding team. While the compatibility issue has been handled, it will still take some time for the kinks to be worked out of the code and for it to be integrated into Azrul Studio's component products. As such, we will only be seeing the compatibility updates out latest by December of this year. For those interested in the development of the 1.5 compatibility project, please tune your browser to our website and watch out for it on our news page, forum or developer blogs. You can also catch the news on the Azrul Studio newsletter. A temporary hotfix will be available soon for testing by our beta testers, those interested can sign up now.

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soon alongwith our all new Jom Comment version 2.0 which will include a much richer interface, many more functionalities and also the support for Joomla! 1.5

User's that are awaiting for the support for Joomla 1.5, please be rest assured that we will send everyone a newsletter regarding this, when the time comes and for future customer's, kindly please get ready for a rocking Jom Comment installation with your Joomla! 1.5 RC3 site.

At the mean time, please do visit our support forums to check out on the latest updates of our components.

Have a nice day!

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Hello all,

As most of you already know, in the past week we made a business decision to remove the free version of MyBlog, NiceTalk, and Jomcomment from our site. These products will now be fully commercial. For those of you who are currently using the free version of any of these products, you can continue to use them but however to get product updates, a purchase would need to be made for the product. In any case, you can always buy MyBlog and if you are not happy with it, there is a 7 day money back guarantee, although I am very confident that you will not be disappointed, with MyBlog being the only blogging component in Joomla! that comes close to WordPress.

MyBlog 0.9 Build 3 is now finished and released. It might take some time for the new release to be put onto the email updates page, as well as Plimus (our sales solution). For existing customers of MyBlog, if you would like to get the new build right away, please send us an email with the email address that you used to purchase MyBlog and we will send you the latest build.

Here is the official release notes for MyBlog 0.9 Build 3:

Myblog 0.9 Build 3 Release Notes
===============================
Package contents
===============================
- com_myblog_std.zip : Installer file for main MyBlog component
- cb.myblogtab.zip : MyBlog Community Builder plugin installer file
- mod_myblog.zip: MyBlog module installer file

===============================
Fixes
===============================
- Auto calc dashboard thickbox size for User Blog page.
- Allow viewing of blog entry content in Joomla backend admin for MyBlog
- Fix ordering in dashboard to be sorted by date
- Fix encoding issues with dashboard home
- fix tag clouds. Previously, tags with a higher frequency had smaller fonts.
- Warning to user that entry will be lost when navigating to View Blog in dashboard
- Add blog description to the MyBlog frontpage whenever visit a blogger's blog
- Fixed social bookmarks bot to use correct links to bookmark
- Fix issue with saving entries when 'Use HTML Editor' is set to No in MyBlog settings.
- Added option to disable image browser
- Fix URL generated when searching blog entries
- Add write a new entry to backend admin interface
- Automatically ping technorati for the main MyBlog frontpage isntead of just pinging for the user's blog
- only allow safe tags for security when saving blog entries. (script tags, embeds, are all disabled)
- Fix RSS entries title link encoding issue with accented characters
- Fix permalink generation to correct convert whitespaces to dashes
- better Itemid detection while in Dashboard
- Add image file upload limit
- Add option for users to post-date publish time.
- removed 'clear' CSS in templates for better compatibility with Pure CSS templates like Rockettheme
- Saving an entry now will take into account if the entry was posted in AM or PM. Previously all entries are saved in AM.
- Remove quotes from permanent link to prevent errors while visiting a link that has quotes.
- Fix issue where SMF avatar only appears for the first entry

===============================
Recently Added Features
===============================
- Added feature to list all blogs. Create a menu link-url to 'index.php?option=com_myblog&task=blogs' to access this feature.

===============================
Useful Menu Links
===============================
- MyBlog Dashboard: Create menu 'link-url' pointing to 'index2.php?option=com_myblog&task=adminhome&admin=1&no_html=1'
- MyBlog Dashboard in a Thickbox: Create a menu 'link-url' pointing to 'index.php?option=com_myblog&task=adminhome&admin=1&lightbox=1&no_html=1'
- View My Blog: Create a menu 'link-url' pointing to 'index.php?option=com_myblog&task=userblog'
- View All Blog Entries: Create a menu 'Component' for MyBlog
- List all blogs/bloggers: Create a menu 'link-url' pointing to 'index.php?option=com_myblog&task=blogs'

Also, along with the bug fixes, we have also bundled the new MyBlog module in the Standard and Pro versions. The module is pretty awesome - sections of the module like Archive, Latest Entries, Latest Comments - all change according to the person's blog that you are viewing (or all blogs if you are viewing the main MyBlog page). You can also customize the order in which the sections appear in the module. Another thing you can do is copy the module, and then have (let's say for example) Latest Entries and Archive appear on one module on the left side of the page, and another module containing Tag Clouds and Latest Comments on the right side of the page.

And for those who have been waiting for the Pro version for a looooong time, we are happy to announce that the Pro version is ready, and it will only be a while until we get the Pro version uploaded to Plimus and have a purchase link available for it. The Pro version includes a few templates, most of which will be familiar to WordPress users as the templates were based on existing top-downloaded WordPress templates. As we progress we will also be adding more and more templates to the Pro Version. For $10 extra, it's worth the purchase =). Oh and not to mention we remove the "Powered By Azrul's MyBlog" Link on each page.

On top of that, we are also providing prioritized customer support for our paying customers! =D

Hope you all like the new features and module and bug fixes in this new build. If there are any problems, issues, or enquiries, please do not hesitate to email us at support@azrul.com , or visit our forums at http://forum.azrul.com/index.php/board,14.0.html

Thank you all

 

 

 

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After weeks of toiling and nailing bugs, we are getting real close to bringing out a stable version of MyBlog - stable meaning all major bugs exterminated. MyBlog 0.9 Build 2 addresses a lot of the issues of not being able to save a blog entry in the Dashboard, and should be a fix for most, if not all, users.

Our next step would be to release the Pro version of MyBlog, which would have the 'Powered by...' footer removed, as well as a few additional MyBlog templates to choose from. In the process we will also be looking into feature additions for both the standard and pro versions of MyBlog.

Someone did mention the trackback does not work, so I'll try trackbacking to one entry on this site and see if it works.

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is now in the Top 5 Highest Rated Extensions , thanks to all our users' support and help in making MyBlog one of the best (if not the best) blogging component for Joomla! If you haven't rated or reviewed MyBlog, please head over to the Joomla Extensions Directory and rate/review MyBlog!

In the next week or so, we will be working towards bringing MyBlog out of Beta and into a stable release version. Feature additions will be minimal until we get the bugs all squashed and exterminated =). If you encounter a bug, do email us at support@azrul.com , or visit our support forum.

Have a nice weekend everyone.

Posting from MyBlog's Thickbox Dashboard interface =D

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This blog should show up on the technorati site, together with their tags.

Edit: Sweet, blog post appeared at Technorati 

- hengwoon

azrul.com

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Starting from Jom Comment 1.8, we will be using a completely new template system. It is a super-fast, super efficient PHP-based template system. It doesn't do the typical 'search and replace' which most template does.

On top of that, we also have a new caching system in place.  We no longer have to rebuild the comment area at every page load. Of course, if you are already using Joomla built-in caching system, your content (along with Jom Comment)  are already cached in anyway.

I run some benchmark and building Jom Comment page now takes between 0.002 to 0. 005 seconds compared to non-cached time of 0.10 to o.15 seconds! That's 75x performance increase.

Anyway, as I said before, if your site already have Joomla caching turned on, this doesn't really mean much to you. 

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