Joomla! is 10 today :-) A birthday calls for gifts, so we've got some great deals for you, from us and several of our friends in the Joomla! world.
But what a ride this has been!
10 years ago, I remember learning about Joomla! birth with a mixture of feelings. Surprise first: I was really, really not following closely the CMS land at the time. Puzzlement as well: why split from Mambo? what was this all about?. And lastly, a bit of resentment as well! What, now surely I would have to redo most of the few sites I was running on my spare time? And how backward-compatible was this thing going to be? (the more things change, the more they are the same, it seems!). Of course, I didn't want to migrate the dozen extensions I had already written. One of them, a system to get better SEF URLS, was really big and complex for me back then!
Today we're releasing on the JED wbReactiv, a simple plugin that we hope we'll be helpful in managing your Joomla! web site.
If some of your users don't receive the Joomla activation email when registering on your site, your only options today are either to manually validate their account - but they probably won't receive any email you send them, or delete their account and ask them to recreate it, which is rather tedious.
To help mitigate this problem, we've created wbReactiv. This small plugin adds a "Resend" button on your Joomla 3.x users list and profile page. It's free and you can get it from our download area. We've also written a bit of documentation, though it doesn't really need any.
We're now 3 months into Weeblr's new life as the sh404SEF and Josetta home. I've been extremely busy since day one, but fortunately, I'm not alone in this any longer, and we've been able to build a small but efficient team. Support and administration are now done much more efficiently, but more on this in another post.
With more people sharing the work, we've been able not only to cater to the support requests and prepare another release with bug fixes and new features (more on that in a separate post also), but to finally complete a long awaited full rewrite of sh404SEF user documentation. I am therefore very happy to announce that the documentation page has now been updated and provides detailed instructions about setting up and using sh404SEF on your site.
My name is Yannick Gaultier. At the end of summer 2006, I released the first public version of sh404SEF to Joomla! users. At the time, it was only very simple SEF URL manager, but quickly its feature set expanded into many different areas of SEO, security and site analytics.
I have been lucky to see it used by many through the following years, to the point where it became necessary to turn its development and support into a full time operation. For the last 5 five years, during which Josetta, the translation manager, came to life, I got into a distribution agreement with Anything Digital, which provided sales and first-level support for both extensions, while I would concentrate on development work and handling trickier support cases.
As of today however, I am pleased to announce that my own company, Weeblr llc, will again be entirely in charge of sh404SEF and Josetta: sales, support, and of course development as before. Weeblr.com is now the source for official support, documentation and most importantly download of any new version of both sh404SEF and Josetta, starting with the just released versions 4.4.8 and 2.3.1 respectively.
It certainly is a big change, but one I feel is now necessary to keep both products at the forefront of their categories, as well as start new extensions and products better suited to a changing environment. I want to get back on the front line, in touch with Joomla! and sh404SEF users around the world, have more direct talks. These are my goals in switching back from a safe spot to a more exposed but hopefully more rewarding and efficient one.
