It has been awhile since I have updated this site to Joomla 1.7. Since then I have had no comment system available because the JComments developer has not updated it to work with 1.7. They have released a beta to look at but you can't download it. Needless to say, this is a little frustrating since it appears to work and I would love to be able to test it and help if possible. But my offers in their forum to help out have gone unnoticed.

This is why I am now pledging that I will convert JComments into a working Joomla 1.7 extension and release it within the next month from this date.

I have set up a development tracker for it here: http://dev.ty2u.com/sitecomments

I will help fix bugs and issues people report. I will maintain it. However, I have to make a new name for it because I don't want to cause any trouble with the original author. So far all I have come up with is Site Comments. If you have any better suggestions please let me know and I will take them into consideration.

I don't know if they plan to ever release JComments, but maybe they are working furiously on it behind the scenes, but they give us no updates so we don't know. Therefore we must take this into our own hands.

I have to finish one paid project I am currently working on but I am willing to set aside all my other plans for this because I want a comment system for my sites and I know many other people really want it too. There have been some other good comment systems released but they are either not as fully featured as JComments was, or not freely available. Or maybe there are more by now, I haven't checked in awhile.

If you feel like helping out in some way or have any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment... errr, nevermind. I think EasyBlog allows comments without JComments anyway but I probably don't have it enabled since I was using JComments before. You could sign up on the dev tracker I linked above and add a feature request.

You can donate if you like. I accept Paypal! Right now the only way I have to do that is if you send a Paypal to admin@ty2u.com or enter an amount into one of the boxes on the front page of this site where I offer my other extensions for download.

UPDATE: I added a donation page with goal thermometer (it doesn't update automatically yet though). http://ty2u.com/donate.html

As always, any help is appreciated. Donations are greatly appreciated as well. So thank you to everyone who donates. It really helps out more than you could possibly know, even an amount of 1 helps out Together we will make this possible.

As you probably didn't notice (unless you did for some reason), the shop is missing. And I figured I should blog about it and let you know what happened, incase you are wondering for some perplexing reason.

After updating the shop site one time I decided to not spend anymore time on it. The problem was that it was running Drupal and every time I upgraded Drupal it would cause problems with modules and take up huge amounts of my time. I had a large amount of modules installed. It was a pretty nice setup actually but since I only had one product on it, which barely anyone bought anyway (thank you to the few people who did), I may as well release that product here as GPL when I get time to make sure it works in Joomla 1.7.

It was a jDownloads sh404SEF extension and it costed a whole $7. I believe it still works, but I don't use jDownloads anymore on here unfortunately. It is a really great app though. Good job Arno!

As you can see, I have a new download system. I created this myself from scratch and eventually, once it's running smoothly, I will release it open source under the GPL for everyone to enjoy. Currently it's simply not finished but it seems to work fairly decently to allow people to download things while giving them the option to pay. So far only one person has paid 1 Euro for a download. A great big thank you to that person! After fees I think I got a whole 89 cents Canadian or something, but I'm not complaining. That is sincerely a very kind gesture. These seem like tough times and I have a feeling they won't be getting any better for a little bit. But once they do they will be a lot better. And perhaps there will be different payment methods and different currencies.

This brings me to my next idea which I plan to implement into my new download extension. I hope to some day add the ability to support multiple payment processors, and multiple currencies, with perhaps an option to allow visitors to suggest new forms of payment (like cookies or sheep) which can be accepted or rejected by the admin. Something along those lines anyway. If you have any ideas feel free to let me know.

However, you will have to post in the forums or contact me since jComments has not been released for Joomla 1.7 yet and so my comment system is still missing on this site. But that is not a simple extension. I took a look and it seems fairly complex so hopefully they can get it released. Maybe it already is actually. I will have to take a look.

Peace, love and light to all!

I just released a new Drop Login plugin for Joomla. This is inspired by various extensions I found for Joomla which don't really work the way we wanted and so this plugin was born.

This is the plugin in use at the top of this site. I am using the x5 login box module for this which I have modified slightly.

As you can see, when you click the login link a panel will drop down and a login form will be shown. Once you log into the site it will show a Dashboard link and the Login link will turn into a Logout link and you can see the x5 module's logout button rather than the login form. You can click the links to switch between the two panels. You can click the link of the currently displayed panel, the X button, or just click anywhere else on the page other than the panel to close it.

I have simply placed the user menu with links to edit their profile in the Dashboard of the Drop Login plugin for when users are logged in but you can add more extravagant things to it if you like.

Click here for a list of features and to download the Drop Login plugin for Joomla.

I just wanted to give you a look at the new Joomla template I am creating. There will be a free version as well as a professional version of this Joomla template for those who want more features. Please feel free to leave a comment with any suggestions or feature requests and I can see if I can put them in.

A new, freshly baked version of the Date and Time module for Joomla 1.7 is available. This is the 2nd beta in the 2.2 series.

Thank you to all those reporting bugs and feature requests and especially to those who help by posting fixes!

Click Read More below to view the changes.

It has been awhile since I've released an update to the Date and Time module for Joomla. So I am now releasing a version 2.2.15beta of the Date and Time Module for Joomla 1.6.

Download: http://ty2u.com/downloads/modules/date-and-time/

Documentation: http://ty2u.com/date-and-time-module/date-and-time

I just uploaded an update to the sh404SEF extension for jDownloads. Existing customers can download updates from the My Account area at the Shop.

People say I should be selling this for way more but I haven't raised the price yet... Get it while it's hot! Still only $7!

More info: jDownloads sh404SEF Extension

So there I was working furiously on a new Joomla 1.6 template and out of the blue I am "randomly contacted via email" by a friendly gentleman offering to let me test out his Joomla extension called EasyBlog.

Of course, I was skeptical at first but it looked pretty cool in the screen-shots so I figured it would be worth a try. I am glad I did give it a whirl because I am super impressed! And super happy I have a brand new blogging tool to actually help me get into gear again.

There are a lot of features in EasyBlog which will definitely help to improve my blogging experience and encourage me to blog more often. It should also feed traffic to my site because when setting it up I found myself wanting to sign up for FeedBurner and Twitter and some other things I should have done long ago. Not to mention it also allows visitors to sign up and post blog posts of their own!

I just updated the free Joomla template named Vivacious to version 1.6.1

This update adds a parameter to load / disable the MooTools library that was missing from the xml file.

I just answered a question on the Joomla forums which I thought I should post here because I find myself using this trick fairly often and many others must have this problem but not know the secret.

Sometimes you are trying to assign a template but it just doesn't assign properly. I think something gets messed up somewhere and so you can just simply not assign any templates to menu items anymore. I have a quick fix for it.

1. Change the default template to some other template that you don't want as your default
2. Edit your default template by clicking its name
3. Click the radio button "Select from List"
4. Select all the items in the list - an easy way to do this is by clicking the first item, hold down shift, then click the last item
5. Click Save to save the menu assignments
6. Now set it as your default template again by selecting the radio button to the left of its name and clicking Default at the top right of the screen

Now you should be able to assign other templates to menus properly again. If not then you may have to play around some more by assigning some templates to all menus and saving and then assigning them to none and saving. I think somehow something gets mucked up and just has to be refreshed like this in order for it to work properly again.

Here is the Date and Time module 2.1.8 with a fix in the ordering of the code thanks to a user on the forums.

Visit the page here for the complete changelog and details on using the module.

Lately I have been getting lots of emails on some sites registering that are spam. Even with all my things to try to prevent it that I have tried it is an ongoing battle and you have to always be ready to stop it. I decided I wanted to block all emails from mail.ru from registering since they seem to be spam usually but I didn't know how to do that. So I figured I would track down a way and eventually found myself in the Joomla forums.

I discovered a post by SundanceKid on how to ban certain email domains from registering. Thank you!

I modified it slightly so it didn't have yahoo or gmail in it. I also changed the error message below to be less obvious because I figured if they know its the email domain causing the error they will probably just try another one. But if they do this you can add another one to block by copying one of the lines in the middle of the code below and modifying it with the new domain.

Please post comments of any domains you find that are known to be spam and I will add it to the list for future use.

I was thinking that maybe there is some better way to do this by hooking it to some sort of database that probably already exists out there but this is good for now since all I really wanted to do is block mail.ru.

File: components/com_user/controller.php
Line: 266 (may differ per Joomla release)

  // ##### BEGIN: SPAM DOMAIN FILTER #####
  // Kick out spam domains
  $email = $user->get('email');
  if ( strpos($email,"gawab.com") ||
  strpos($email,"mail.ru")  ||
  strpos($email,"list.ru")  ||
  strpos($email,"bk.ru") ||
  strpos($email,"minivds.ru") ||
  strpos($email,"nakgirls.ru") ||
  strpos($email,"yandex.ru") ||
  strpos($email,"info1a.cn") ||
  strpos($email,"gooogletartsert.net") ||
  strpos($email,"freemeilaadressforall.net") ||
  strpos($email,"goodemailadressforfree.net") ||
  strpos($email,"5opicforum.cn") ||
  strpos($email,"pozitifff.com") ||
  strpos($email,"2008bases1.net") ||
  strpos($email,"nm.ru") ||
  strpos($email,"goldwoof.net") ||
  strpos($email,"megapochta.cn") ||
  strpos($email,"meta.ua") ||
  strpos($email,"fene4ek.net") ||
  strpos($email,"mail15.com") ||
  strpos($email,"googlemail.com") ||
  strpos($email,"yandex.com") ||
  strpos($email,"inmail24.com") )
  {
  JError::raiseWarning('','Error');
  $this->register();
  return false;
  }
  // ##### END: SPAM DOMAIN FILTER #####

Joomla Template SEO Techniques

This guide was originally written for Joomla 1.0 but could be interpretted to later versions of Joomla.

I am seeing many people mention that SEO is in the hands of the Joomla template designer. Well being a Joomla template designer I can definitely see what you are talking about and it is true to an extent. However it still has very much to do with the core of Joomla itself, the components and modules and how they are all coded since they will be displayed through the template. It is a group effort and that is what Joomla is all about.