Catalog

We received an email from a customer recently that reminded us of a core Joomla value.  Whilst it's nice to have the fanfare of opening high profile public Web sites on software you helped write, Joomla's main edge has been it's ability to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.  The following story epitomizes this paradigm.

JXtended Catalog was one of the first truly flexible content systems (typically called CCKs nowadays) available for Joomla 1.5.  It was first developed in 2006 and released for sale in 2007 as one of the first commercial GPL products available for Joomla.  It filled a wide gap in the Joomla extensions market for a directory that supported searchable custom fields, a full depth category tree and also the ability to map items to multiple categories.

Following from the release of the new JXtended site, the demo site has also been updated and expanded with the latest version of all our commercial products.

The demo site includes complete example installs of three essential extensions for all Joomla Web sites:

• Comments - visitor and user commenting, content rating and social bookmark links;
• Finder - advanced and accurate searching for Joomla Web site; and
• Labels - labels/tags for your content that integrates directly with the administrator article edit page.

Each of these extensions is easy to install and configure in minutes.

For your projects that need a little bit more horsepower, example installs of our content management extensions are also available:

• Catalog - perfect for directory sites; and
• Magazine - to suit sites that mimic printed magazine-style, publication based Web sites.

Administrator access is available to give you a feel for how all these extensions can lift what you can offer on your Joomla Web site.

To find out more, visit the JXtended extensions page.

We are very excited to announce the release of Labels for Joomla 1.5, an innovative tool that allows you to categorize and group content in a way that is friendly to people both browsing and administering your Joomla site. Labels takes the idea of tagging content to a whole new level by not only grouping content for visitors, but by performing the same organization for site administrators as well. No longer will content managers have to sift through all the articles and extensions on your site - no matter how simple or complex your site is, finding and editing content is only a few clicks away.

Mapping has been an integral part of the Magazine and Catalog since their inception.  Both store the mapping location via latitude and longitude values.  While these values are very efficient for plotting points, they are not the easiest the look up.  The good people from MyDynamicSite asked us if it was possible to just put in an address.  I must admit, I did stuggle trying to work out what the lat/long was for my house when I actually tried to find out what it was.  So fortunately for us, Google's Map API has such a feature and with a little hunting we found the appropriate code snippet to drop in.

CEOffice Concepts has just launched their new site, choosing Catalog for Joomla! 1.5 as the basis to display their range of furniture and office equipment.

www.theartofjoomla.com is currently launching. It's a great example of the traditional publication style magazine site, using Magazine, and also starts to show of a little of the Catalog system.