Begining in June all those Google Maps you see on web sites everywhere it seems will change. Maps that use the Google API will need to have a credit card enabled on the account so that Google can charge if you exceed the free limit.

Some designers are saying "No worries, I don't use the API - I just embed the map". Bad news is that all those embedded maps will now be watermarked with a message  of "for development use only" and will be grayed out. Not very professional looking.

Need help with your Map ?

One of my clients needed to generate a PDF from their ACYMailing Newsletter. In the past I have used Phoca PDF to generate PDF's from Joomla content, however, this extension only works with Joomla articles and so was not an option.

The quick fix for this (and other Joomla extensions) is to "print" in the Chrome Browser. Simply navigate to the page in Chrome, choose print, select the pages that are generated, and save your PDF. Photos and links are retained and the output was exactly what we needed.

Although Phoca Gallery is a great photo management tool for Joomla, I had forgotten the steps to upload and create a gallery. I jumped on over to youtube.com where I found the Basic Joomla Tutorials channel. Tim Davis from Cybersalt Consulting and Communications has a number of tutorials on all sorts of Joomla related subjects. He also uses some of my favorite tools from Regular Labs, Akeeba, MyJoomla, and of course Phoca Gallery. The tutorials are very easy to watch since Tim is such a likeable guy. Every Monday he has a live "Maintenance Monday" video with chat and it has been fun to pop in and chat up some Joomla :) I encourage all of my clients to subscribe to his youtube channel.

Once again, Joomla! has won the award for the best free CMS for 2017. The runner up was WordPress. Joomla! was also the winner in 2016 and 2015. No surprise to me ;)

Having your website hacked is more costly than keeping it up to date. Joomla 3.6.4 released today.

Seems like it was just a week or so ago that I was excited about Joomla 3.5 and now I am reading about the new features in Joomla 3.6. I am especially excited about this feature:

Joomla! Update has been improved and now allows you to reinstall Joomla’s core files at the click of a button, overwriting any modified file(s) and reverting them back to the default.

As a designer/developer this is going to save me a lot of time when I need to use it. Prior to the introduction of this feature this task had to be done by hand and was very laborious. Thankfully this is not something that needs to be done very often.

Security updates - Joomla! 3.4.6 is now available. This is a security release for the 3.x series of Joomla which addresses a critical security vulnerability and 4 low level security vulnerabilities. We strongly recommend that you update your sites immediately.

All versions of Joomla need a security update so if you are on an older version, here are instructions courtesy of OSTraining:

https://www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/hotfixes/

Need help updating your site to the newest version or making your site secure ? Contact Us today.