Macrotone Blogs

Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.

Password Control 0.1.7 released

Password Control Icon

Password Control system plugin release 0.1.7 for Joomla 3.4 and 3.5.

This update corrects the display of the deprecated constructor method message seem when PHP 7 is used upon a site.

The install file is available in the download area.

Joomla 3.5.0. released

joomlaThe Joomla! Project and the Production Leadership Team are proud to announce the release of Joomla! 3.5.0.

Introducing 34 new features, including support for the recently released PHP 7 scripting language, which significantly increases web site speed.

This version of Joomla! supports the most recent release of PHP, the most popular programming language for developing web applications. PHP 7 was recently announced with significant performance improvements and is now available for use by the general public. With Joomla! 3.5 users can now enjoy the benefit of that performance improvement.

Joomla's new email update notification plugin periodically checks for available Joomla! updates and bug fixes, then emails administrators to notify them. 3.5's new statistics collection plug-in gathers the system environment in use. The raw data collected is anonymised before transmission and access to the compiled data is publicly available at https://developer.joomla.org/about/stats.html.

To have a full list of the features please visit our GitHub Repository.

Official release details are located here.

Joomla Audit 1.2.0 released.

auditWe are pleased to announce the availability of Macrotone Joomla Audit release 1.2.0 for Joomla 3.4

This minor release intended to support Joomla 3.5 also corrects a few minor problems discovered in the earlier release.

This version has been tested against Joomla 3.4 and Joomla 3.5 RC3.

 See the changelog for details of all of the changes.

 The update is available in the download area.

Timesheet Component 1.0.2 released

timesheet

We are pleased to announce the release 1.0.2 of our Timesheet component for Joomla 3.4.

Macrotone Timesheet is a component which allows employees to enter timesheet information that may later be printed and/or distributed to the company accounts for processing. The idea is that employees have a central mechanism for time entries against specific project (or account) codes.

At initial release it runs upon Joomla 3.4 the current Joomla release.  Note that it requires a MySQL database version 5.5.3 or higher.

This minor update corrects a few newly discovers problems but also runs upon Joomla 3.5 RC1.

Please see the changelog for more details.

Using a custom Joomla library in your components

We were aware of an article written by Roberto Segura which covers the use of libraries in ones; own written components.  This addresses (in one way) a conclusion that there was a certain amount of duplication particularly in the language strings but also in code that is used both in the front end of a Joomla site and in the back end of the site.

We have been ‘playing’ (for want of another word) with the concept in a new component that we are developing and are very pleased with the way that it is shaping up.  We had already made changes in some of our later components to use the back end language strings in preference to the front end language files, and also where ever possible use the Joomla globally defined strings, but the use of a specific component library can aid in the use of language strings but also in the use of common code, without the need for adding additional code to include specific files by making use of the Joomla library autoloader.

We thought it was worth sharing this with our readers as even though we have been using Joomla for many years there is still much more to learn and discover. This is after all another one of the things we like about Joomla.

IP Mapping 1.4.0 released

location-48IP Mapping release 1.4.0 available.

The Joomla component came from a requirement to display IP addresses of site visitors upon Google maps.

This minor update corrects a minor problem but was mainly intended to prepare for Joomla 3.5 and the character set utf8mb4.

See the changelog for details.

The release is available in the usual download location on our site.

Timesheet Component 1.0.1 released

timesheet

We are pleased to announce the release 1.0.1 of our Timesheet component for Joomla 3.4.

Macrotone Timesheet is a component which allows employees to enter timesheet information that may later be printed and/or distributed to the company accounts for processing. The idea is that employees have a central mechanism for time entries against specific project (or account) codes.

At initial release it runs upon Joomla 3.4 the current Joomla release.  Note that it requires a MySQL database version 5.5.3 or higher.

This minor update corrects a few newly discovers problems but more importantly add a system plugin to provide synchronisation for the users details.

Please see the changelog for more details.

Timesheet Component 1.0.0 released

timesheet

We are pleased to announce the release of our latest component Timesheet for Joomla 3.4.

Macrotone Timesheet is a component which allows employees to enter timesheet information that may later be printed and/or distributed to the company accounts for processing. The idea is that employees have a central mechanism for time entries against specific project (or account) codes.

At initial release it runs upon Joomla 3.4 the current Joomla release.  Note that it requires a MySQL database version 5.5.3 or higher.

A timesheet is defined as a piece of ​paper upon which an employee records the number of hours they have ​worked. We have taken this and made it a Joomla component for recording these hours, Within the back end of the site one can add existing Joomla users to the timesheet tables, thus enabling them to create/edit their own timesheets. One also defines the users who can 'approve' and already completed timesheet, either at this stage or later.

The back is is also where the account/project codes are created and maintained. In the initial release the time codes are visible via a front end display, but are not editable or created on the front end.

The front end is where users will create their timesheet, and where they are generally approved. The timesheet' grid' is where the hours assigned against each project (or account) code is performed. All grid editing occurs solely in the users browser. The grid data is not saved to the database until the user presses the 'Save' button.

Note that time sheet grid editing is not implemented in the back end by design.

The component has an option to ensure that each user can only submit one timesheet for each defined weekly period.

Password Control 0.1.6 released

Password Control Icon

Password Control system plugin release 0.1.6 for Joomla 3.4.

This update adds the password checks to the User password rest form when the user has 'forgotten' their password.  It also updates the copyright date to 2016 and changes the 'once date' criteria to be a calendar form field.

The install file is available in the download area.

Joomla 3.4.8 released

joomlaThe Joomla! Project and the Production Leadership Team are proud to announce the release of Joomla! 3.4.8.

This is a bug fix release for the 3.x series of Joomla This release fixes some bugs related to session management from Joomla 3.4.7. The project understands that many of our users are now on Christmas Holiday's so we would like to emphasise that this release only contains bug fixes and whilst we strongly encourage our users to update as soon as practically possible, this update can be left until after any holidays.

What's in 3.4.8

Joomla 3.4.8 fixes some issues found in the 3.4.7 release on Monday to do with browser sessions. All reported bugs from the 3.4.7 update have been fixed in this release:

For known issues with the 3.4.8 release, see the Version 3.4.8 FAQ in the documentation site.. Please note that it is expected that you will be logged out as soon as the update is complete.

Official release details are located here.

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