Macrotone February 2015 Newletter
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| Newsletter February 2015 | ||
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A New Year and a new start.It has been a funny sort of start to 2015, our internet access has been very unstable which has made external support very difficult. The problem is still ongoing even as this newsletter is being prepared, and we remain hopeful of a resolution soon, but we remain at the mercy of the internet line provider. 2015 Roadmap
SMS Feedback requestWe introduced the ability to send Issue Tracker notifications via SMS using the AcySMS product in release 1.6.5 of Issue Tracker. We would welcome any feedback upon how useful (or not) this feature is proving to be in practise and would use this knowledge to define how we will further develop this particular feature.
Joomla 2.5 - End of LifeAs you probably already know, the Joomla! project ceased support for Joomla 2.5 on Dec 31, 2014. That means all Joomla 2.5 websites will not receive any official updates including bugs and security updates.
If you’re on version 2.5.x then you really should be looking to upgrade and move to the latest version of Joomla 3.3.6 (time of writing). If you are planning to start a new Joomla site, we recommend to choose Joomla 3 – it's stable and way cooler.
Joomla 3.4 is also currently scheduled for release later this month [24th February] and is looking good.
Deprecated FeaturesWe are users of the excellent Akeeba Backup Pro component and note the announcement of the future removal of the 'Restore Points' feature which we make use of with all our components. We will be sorry to see the feature removed, and the consequence is that it will no longer be available for our usage. For that reason we wish to make you aware that at some currently unknown time in the future we will be withdrawing the implementation from our code.
Whilst on the same topic of deprecated features, we note that the 'Live Update' functionality, also from Akeeba has not been updated for some time and is itself making use of Joomla deprecated features. Since Akeeba themselves no longer use the software we suspect the writing is on the wall for this as well, so would not be surprised if we also have to remove this integration as well at some future time. This is indeed a pity since we have found the mechanism much more informative and more effective than the standard Joomla update functionality. It is certainly without doubt more speedy. Depending upon the work involved we may fork our own development version for our usage, but this will very much depend upon the amount of work/changes required, something that we have not yet evaluated.
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Issue Tracker News Release 1.6.6.The latest version 1.6.6 has been released and resolves one specific long running problem which seemed to impact a small number of sites. The problem was only seen on a few sites where for database configuration reasons there was a restricted length of the database index key length. This problem was particularly difficult to resolved and involved much testing and has resulted in changing the index so that the length of the index key is restricted to 720 bytes (240 characters). There is an extended discussion of the topic in the forum so for those who are interested it is worth reading the posts.
There are also a few minor improvements and a few fixes discovered since the earlier 1.6.5 release. 
IP Mapping News Forthcoming release 1.2.4.We are currently working on some enhancements to the next release of this component. In particular there are some expected changes to the Mapping module and also to the Visitor Agent. In addition there are also some minor changes to the back end displays. It is a little to early to provide a release date as yet but we are aiming to try and get it 'out of the door' within the next month. More specific details will be in the next newsletter.
JAudit News Release 1.0.1 available.It was hard to believe that over a year has passed since we released this component and in that time have received no error reports. There were a few minor changes that we wanted to implement and these are now in the latest version.
It is true to say that this is probably not our most downloaded component but it does what it is intended to do, and it performs a task that only a small number of sites have a real need for, since auditing is not a major requirement for many. It does however address many of the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley act, something that we do not believe is performed by any other Joomla component.
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MiscellaneousTranslations
We have updated our Translation teams page to also now display the Transifex profile of the translators, if no other (provided) link has been received. This all helps our translators to show the other projects and work that they perform.
For current details of availability of translations, please check our web site. A list of all our translators can be seen here.
We would like to repeat that all our translators provide their services free of charge, and to thank them on behalf of all our users who make use of their work.
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER This newsletter is published by Macrotone Consulting Ltd, which provides IT services to its clients and creates business tools: Copyright 2015 Macrotone Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.
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Hot off the presses we can announce work has started upon a new Ukrainian (Ukraine) translation of Issue Tracker. That brings our total up to 23 translations being worked upon for the component. Some of these are more active than others, but of note are the complete Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish (Spain), Dutch (Netherlands) and German (Germany) translations that are 100% complete.
