A quick post to keep you updated on what's happening both in and outside of the Joomla World and what's the outlook for 2024 here at Weeblr!
Big 4SEO feature release
We just released 4SEO 5.2.0 (4SEO full changelog is here) and it has several important new or changed things that should make your life both easier and more efficient:
Sitemaps now handled through Google Search Console
4SEO used to ping Google and Bing when a sitemap was ready or updated. Pinging means that we would make a request to a specific URL at Google, telling them "Hey, there's a new/modified sitemap for this website".
It was simple and quick but both Google and Bing have now stopped this service. So I took the opportunity to revamp the sitemap publication process and use 4SEO Search Console connection to directly submit sitemaps to Google.
This happens automatically and transparently each time your sitemap is created or updated. You can also manually submit your sitemap from within 4SEO at any time with a single click.
Today's one of these great days, where the Joomla community can regroup around a major new release of our preferred CMS: Joomla 5 has just landed minutes ago and is available for all to upgrade to.
What's in it?
No need to re-hash the Joomla.org announcement, you can read all the details there. Joomla 5 has a lot of internal, technical changes and improvements as well as new features. Let's mention:
Admin template dark mode
Some Structured data generation
Performance improvements
AVIF file format support (for more efficient images)
A super quick post, again about our subscriptions. A month ago, I announced that all our extension subscriptions would come in two flavors: updates and support for either 3 or 200 websites.
- The regular plans including 3 websites are geared towards individuals who usually run one website. The plan includes 3 sites to account for test versions you may be running on a subdomain or on your computer, so that you don't have to worry about that
- The PRO plans include(d) up to 200 sites, and are of course for agencies and independent developers who operate a large number of websites on behalf of their clients
Turns out these 200 websites plans has caused some confusion with some users, so in the sake of clarification and effective immediately, all PRO plans are valid for an unlimited number of websites.
This has been reflected on the website, and if you purchased already a PRO plan, when it was showing a 200 sites limit, this of course applies to you as well and your subscription is valid for an unlimited number of sites.
What I like discussing about in these blog posts and podcast episodes is technology, new features, and new products. But sometimes other, less fun topics must be addressed, and today I have not one but two such topics.
We'll have a new version of 4AI released later this week, now that GPT4 is available for all at last, but for now let's deal with price changes and the discontinuation of sh404SEF.
How to increase prices without increasing prices?
The elephant in the room: most of the world has been taken into a spiral of inflation and cost increases over the last couple of years. I am no exception, and it's been a struggle to try and keep our prices as they were during that time.
Trying to keep up with technology is not easy these days, with nearly daily announcements of lots of different things. Some are just passing distractions, but some are likely to stick with us long term. I think most agree Large Language Models, often just called "AI", are one of these technologies that are going to stay and will change many things.
This is why a few months ago, looking at the API becoming available from different providers, I decided to start developing a new Joomla extension to bring AI-powered assistance to Joomla website owners: 4AI.
Why an extension when I can just use ChatGPT?
I believe chat-like interfaces such as ChatGPT are a good fit for many use cases but not the best for all - and I'm not the only one to think that by the way.
There are drawbacks to using chat-based tools, for instance:
you need to write your question, and to get a good result, it may take multiple attempts. Writing the right questions is not for everyone.
Being a Joomla extension, 4AI knows how to provide the prompt context the ChatGPT AI needs to do a proper job
Using the output is not always easy, for instance performing changes to existing content while respecting existing design, or just injecting the response into your Joomla site
In other words, ChatGPT is great for "open" discussions but using it directly inside of Joomla may not be as easy as it seems at first.
There have already been a few plugins to use the ChatGPT API from inside Joomla, but they are mostly just an input field that's passed to the API, therefore not providing that much assistance.
