Technical

Cricket Liu at the IOD

Institute of Directors2020Media staff  attended a talk by DNS guru Cricket Liu at the prestigious Institute of Directors today.

Cricket Liu is known as the co-author of the BIND DNS books and today gave a talk on a variety of IPv6 topics. You can view the webcast here for a limited time.

2011 is the year that IPv6 really matters. The Asia-Pacific region has now run out of IPv4 addresses and it’s very likely the European/Russian/MiddleEast area will run out before the end of 2011. Even if you do not need to deploy it immediately, you should begin planning for IPv6, including making sure your infrastructure and your ISP can support it.

Read more about IPv6 at our IPv6 day page and our IPv6 deployment plan

Technical

Updating Joomla 1.6

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Regular users of Joomla! will have got used to patching their installation with FTP or on the command line. You may not be aware but the new versions of Joomla!, 1.6 and beyond, have built in updating. Here’s a very quick guide to updating Joomla! 1.6  yourself.

1. Login to your Joomla! administrator area ( www.domainname.com/administrator/ )
2. Go to Extensions > Extension Manager > And click on “Update”
3. Click on “Find Updates” in the top right and Joomla will automatically find any potential updates available to you.
4. If you see that Joomla is now listed, you should check the box next to “Joomla” and click “Update”.
5. Joomla will automatically update you to the latest version.

Find Updates
Find Updates

Notes: Joomla does not check automatically – administrators need to run the check from the control panel.

The “Find Updates” button is in the top right – the menu area that’s hardly ever used in Joomla and often missed.

With Joomla 1.7 about to be released, developers are wondering how many more updates of 1.6 there will be.

2020Media will be very happy to advise and help with any software update including making complete backups for you.

More information on our Joomla hosting can be found at www.2020media.com/joomla.

Opinion

Control your own Blog

Blogger Status message
Blogger Status - Offline

With the news that popular blogging service Blogger has had continual problems for the past 3 days, isn’t it time to think about self-hosting your blog?

Rather than rely on a massive service like Blogger or WordPress.com, if you host your blog independently you gain control over your site, tech support you can actually speak to you and access to a huge amount of extra features that’ll make your blog stand out from the crowd.

Blog hosting from 2020Media can be added to any existing hosting plan (sometimes at absolutely no cost), or setup as a standalone service. With hosting plans starting at just £45+vat/year (that’s £3.75/month – less than a pint!) it’s very easy to start getting the benefits of an indepedent blog. We offer free installation and setup too.

Tips and Tricks

VirtueMart 2 almost ready

VirtueMart, the popular opensource shopping cart extension for Joomla, have announced the availability of the release candidate of version 2 of the package.

VirtueMart Log0The long awaited release of VirtueMart 2 means there will be one final bugfix and then the software will be ready to use in production. Also in the announcement was news that Joomla 1.6 is not being supported in this release after all. The developers say that as Joomla 1.6 is only being supported by Joomla for 6 months, and 1.7 will be out in around 2 months time – therefore they have not had enough time to develop VirtueMart around Joomla 1.6.

No doubt this news will disappoint some developers who have been eagerly awaiting a fully featured ecommerce add-on compatible with Joomla 1.6, but VirtueMart 2 is a complete rewrite from scratch and will fix many of the outstanding gripes people have with the extension.

The Release Candidate contains a lot new features:

– Media Handler (multiple images)

– Custom Fields (replacing the old attributes, producttypes, variants,…)

– True Child Products in the sense of OOP (unpublished parents can be used as linked product pattern)

– Mail template system

– New Currency Formatting possibilities

– More Modules and Plugins

– New Admin Menu Layout

– Meta Tags

– More Filters and Search Options

– Completely Anonymous Checkout

– Revenue Report

– New Templates

2020Media can provide a completely free installation of VirtueMart with any of our Joomla hosting plans – seee www.2020media.com/plans for further details.

Opinion

CiviCRM for Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6

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CiviCRM 4.0.0 has been released for the latest Drupal version – 7 and the new Joomla version – 1.6. Up until now it was necessary to install CiviCRM on the older Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5.

Highlights

  • CiviCampaign has been integrated with other components such as CiviContribute, CiviMember, CiviEvent, CiviMail and CiviEngage
  • Joomla v1.6 introduced an ACL based permissioning system. This gets CiviJoomla to much closer parity with CiviDrupal.
  • CiviMember now allows membership upsell. This allows membership type to be changed on renewal
  • CiviCRM Extensions. You can now browse and download CiviCRM extensions from within your CiviCRM install.
  • A new API – version 3, introduces standardisation of functions, inputs and outputs.

For users of existing Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5 CiviCRM installs, the simultaneous release of 3.4 for these versions includes the same features.

2020Media provides free installation of CiviCRM on all Drupal and Joomla hosting plans.

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