ICANN, the organisation in charge of the global domain name system, tonight opens the 3 month process for allowing applications for new top level domains. Top level domains are the ‘right of the dot’ extension on domain names – like .com, .uk, .xxx.
From midnight 12 Jan 2012 until April 12th 2012, anyone who can stump up $185,000 (£119,500) as a processing fee can apply for more or less any domain name extention they like*.
*ICANN has a multi-stakeholder consensus-based decision making process so there are plently of caveats, special cases and discounts for worthy causes.
You can find out more about the process at the newgTLD Icann website.
2020Media offers registration services for domain names worldwide and we welcome the changes ICANN has made. Although it’s likely many of the applications will be by big brands like Facebook and Microsoft for domains that won’t be available for the public, there will still be more choice in the coming months and years.
CiviCRM, the free and Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector went from strength to strength in 2011. 2020Media has been providing CiviCRM hosting for several years for organisations small and large. Hosting plans with integrated “zero-click” installs of CiviCRM start at £100 per year. Read more about CiviCRM Hosting.
Planned CiviCRM improvements for 2012
Accounting integration improvements and Quickbooks integration
CiviMobile – CiviCRM for mobile devices
CiviSMS – SMS blasts and interactions
Mass Dedupe and Merge – Batch merging for groups of duplicate contacts
Multiple membership renewal reminders
Relative date filters for all search forms
UK Direct Debit Integration
These planned improvements rely on donations to the core development team, so if you can donate anything at all to help ‘make it happen’, you can do so at http://civicrm.org/mih. You can choose the specific feature you want to target so it’s very clear how your donation gets results.
Let’s a take a detailed look at these 2012 CiviCRM features
This feature is the first step towards enabling better integration of accounting concepts and systems with CiviCRM. It implements a number of data changes to make further enhancements possible, as well as providing Quickbooks integration via IIF file export (and integration with other packages via CSV export)
CiviCRM for mobile devices. This includes iPhone, Android, iPad, Blackberry and more. This version will include the ability to view/search contacts and see most of the details of each contact. It will also have the ability to create/edit contacts, and handle event attendee check-in.
Administrators will be able to configure an unlimited number of reminders at specified dates relative to the membership expiration, and configure different message templates as needed for each reminder.
Joomla! 2.5 will be released in January 2012 and it is the successor of Joomla! 1.5. It will be a so called long term release and it will be the Joomla! state of the art until July 2013. The versions 1.6 and 1.7 were short term releases and they paved the way to Joomla! 2.5.
New Features
Joomla 2.5 will have a host of new features including new search functionality, multi-database support, and update notification.
Search is “reinvented” in Joomla! 2.5 with Finder. The new finder component works with a search index.
New Search Function in Joomla
Based on Finder, which was developed by jXtended, Joomla 2.5 has added an exciting new natural language search function. This feature incorporated auto-completion and stemming. Stemming is the ability for the search to use the root of the word you entered to locate matches. While there is still work to be done, this search is also much better at searching in languages other than English.
This new search is faster and more versatile that the standard search. The data is indexed to get this flexibility and speed. New plugins are required to use this search. Joomla ships with the new core extension plugins, but other extension developers will need to create their own plugins to work with this new search. By default, the standard search is active and this new search is disabled. You can enable the plugin and index your files when the extensions you want to search have the new plugins.
More Databases
With Joomla! 2.5 it will be possible to run Joomla! on MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Drivers for PostgreSQL and Oracle seems to be very near (Getting Ready for Multi-Database Support).
Joomla Update Notification
The number one request from ideas.joomla.org was for Joomla to tell the site administrator when Joomla needs to be updated. Site administrators will now be able to see as soon as they log in if Joomla is out of date. They can then click the button and be taken to the one-click update to Joomla. A second icon does the same thing for any non-core components that are set up for the one-click updating by their developers.
User registrations with CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA plugin using the reCAPTCHA service can be enabled. Once you sign up for free with reCAPTCHA and enter your keys, you can enable CAPTCHA on new user registrations. It could also be used by other extensions needing CAPTCHA. This helps stop spammers signing up to your site.
Better Choices for Offline Mode
You can use the default offline message, disable it or create a customized message. Additionally you can select an image for the offline mode page. You have even a possibility to set the site to offline mode during installation so no unauthorized people can see it before you want them to.
Why 2.5? What happened to 1.8?
New Release Cycle
Every 18 months, a long term release of Joomla! will appear. That’s why 2.5 will be released this month. The .5 signifies a long term release. Moving from 1.7 to 2.5 can be done with the one-click upgrade within Joomla and most extensions that run on 1.7 should also run on 2.5.
Joomla 2.5 is the direct upgrade for Joomla 1.7. Joomla 1.7 will be supported for critical security issues only for a period of one month after the release of Joomla 2.5. After that time, only Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 2.5 will be supported by the Joomla project. Note that Joomla version 2.5 is a long-term-support (LTS) release and will be supported for at least 18 months.
There is a default of 20 line items set in many Joomla backend administration menus – including articles, modules, plugins and the extension manager. This ‘lines per page’ can be changed but it’s not stored next time you login. Here’s how to permanently get Joomla to remember how many lines you’d like to see.
Global configuration > Site settings > List Length
This screenshot is for Joomla 1.5:
The configuration screen in Joomla 1.5
Here’s the same setting in Joomla 1.6, 1.7 and beyond. Click to enlarge.
Just a short post today – we came across this very nice WordPress theme the other day.
Nice WordPress Theme
The creators are www.wpshower.com. They have 10 themes on their site and nearly all of them are free, but all are very high quality.
If you’re starting out in WordPress, a pre-built theme is a useful place to start, and can save you both time and money. As your site develops you may need the services of a web designer. A web designer who understand WordPress can take an existing theme and adapt it seamlessly to your vision, or can build a unique theme just for you. Many web designers and developers use 2020Media’s services, so let us know if we can help put you in touch with one.
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